


SPECTRE Retold

by perkinspoison



Category: SPECTRE (2015)
Genre: M/M, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-14
Updated: 2015-12-30
Packaged: 2018-05-01 15:45:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 24,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5211548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perkinspoison/pseuds/perkinspoison
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"If asked, he would say that he is only curious. MI-6 recruits people who are alone, who are ghosts, and Q is no longer sure if he was condemned from the beginning or if he made himself that way. Like Juan Preciado and the denizens of Comala, perhaps he is only drawn to Bond circumstantially, because they are lying together in the same shallow grave."</p><p>My revision of the plot of SPECTRE, from beginning to end, making Bond and Q the central relationship. Rated Mature to be safe for the later chapters, but basically appropriate for Teens.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Hi everyone! This is going to be a labor of love for the next few weeks, but after seeing SPECTRE I really wanted to see the entire story reworked to be about 00Q, not just because they're adorable, but because I think their relationship compliments the movie's main themes really well. So I'm giving it a go! This is based on one viewing of SPECTRE, so it is not exact about lines/specific details in the film, although there are lots of references of course. This is also my first fic, so please drop a comment if you feel like it! All thoughts and criticism are appreciated (seriously, you all are such good writers, and I want your tips :P ). And thanks for reading!
> 
> PS The Prologue is pretty serious, but expect plenty of snark in the regular chapters.

THE DEAD STILL LIVE

There are evenings like this, shrouded in satin coverlets, when Q dreams that he had been in Mexico City. Granted, he is never the star of his own fantasies. A certain James Bond would be there – was there – leant against Q’s shoulder, idly twirling the garlands in his unkempt charcoal locks. The rows of grotesques and flows of platinum dust rush past them, their motions overdetermined by his penchant for stylization and the fact of 007’s intrinsic gravity. Bond unthreads a hand from his hair, caressing it down to Q’s own skeletal fingers, and the younger man allows himself to be led against the somnambulant currents.

He’s seen Sciarra’s picture enough to recognize that bob of bramble-grey wires poking out from under the strap of a mask. Q sighs with thirst, pressing his sweat-slicked glasses up to the bridge of his nose, and studies the scene for whatever he can manage to see. Grinning Styrofoam skulls rattle their teeth in the breeze. The boffin quirks a smile at the sight of a man on the opposite side of the street with a white cat slung over his shoulder, claws out and bewildered, before losing him in the crowd. Colors tangle around them like tentacles, parting wherever his agent passes as they swim further into the blinding heat of bodies. At last, 007 hooks them around to a stairwell, which ascends into a lobby – typical, Q thinks, licking over his chapped frown, that they’re sharing a hotel room. He might be so lucky to dream of them easing pre-mission stress together. If this is his fantasy, why not go further still and say that he and Bond are coupled in a lovely little flat by the plaza? Why not throw in Moneypenny as their discreet neighbor?

Q can even smell grease on the elevator walls mingling with the fresh sweetness of the flowers curled in his hair. He can even see that sapphire gaze, stark against the boundless monochrome in which Q finds himself complicit: black masks and white skulls, matching suits drawn over with bones, cold white roses strangled in obsidian, pearly flesh, painted nails, eyes gloomy with lust. And that is how he must seem – irrelevant, unremarkable – when Bond draws him in by the small of his back, rocking towards him, his breathless bared teeth hovering over Q’s lips.

He swears that the agent’s unblinking appraisal of him continues all the way to their room, and he should have really guessed by now that Bond sees without eyes, sees everything, sees in the dark. He feels Bond’s hand slip around his waist, his index finger teasing at Q’s protruding hip bone. It’s a subtle warmth that he relaxes into, allowing himself to arch into the proffered arm. Chewing his lip in response, the boffin can’t help but figure how ironic it is that the Brave New World bends as easily before men of Bond’s vintage as the old world ever did: for all his tinkering over gadgets and unassailable code, there is an elegant simplicity to the way the double-oh goes straight for the raw nerves. So Q allows himself that the agent might humor him with a kiss before discarding him in that anonymous bed, unravished, staring after him with the same dejected moue as all the women 007 has left in his wake. 

The quartermaster’s instinct for self-preservation tells him that he ought to be alarmed by any man who kills, drinks, fucks, lies, and disappears as serially as 007 does. Not that he hasn’t had his moments – beneath a breezy exterior, Q knows he can match most agents in danger and ethical disregard pace for pace, which is how he rationalizes it to himself when he rolls over to face James, keeping one eye cracked furtively. If asked, he would say that he is only curious. MI-6 recruits people who are alone, who are ghosts, and Q is no longer sure if he was condemned from the beginning or if he made himself that way. Like Juan Preciado and the denizens of Comala, perhaps he is only drawn to Bond circumstantially, because they are lying together in the same shallow grave.

The sound of gunshots ricochets off the hotel walls, forming a halo over the spot on the bed from which Q hasn’t stirred. There are white petals strewn on the mattress, drifting out of his garlands like snow. Shattering screams and chaos from the plaza below concern him but not viscerally – it’s the Day of the Dead, it’s frightful, and his stomach is already in knots. He should like to think of James rematerializing at the window to find Q exactly as he was at their last encounter, not even an inch out of place, as if the agent had shoved him into bed and blinked and decided to stay. He would likely pin him down – Bond seems the type – and open Q’s legs, and hold his slight wrists against the headboard as stubbornly as steel. But then the ceiling collapses in plaster ripples, and there is a moment of disequilibrium in which the young man thinks he’s diving, headlong, into the rupture. He seems to be at the shore of the Baltic again, his parents grinning from afar as he rolls in the sand, permitting the sea to lap at him gently.

This is what became of Estrella Moreno, who remained in her room when Bond strode out to assassinate Mr. Sciarra. Apparently she suffocated, Death painting her youthful face with sweat and concrete. One of the window panes pierced her shoulder. Q’s seen the autopsy photographs and the agony scribed in her features, and rubbing the dark circles under his eyes, he wonders if he wasn’t wrong about Bond to begin with: not a glutton but an ascetic, whose excesses in girls, alcohol, and fashion are the paltry evidence of his true vice. Q mulls it over quietly, without condemnation, himself incapable of moral aspersions in their line of work.

So he supposes it was Estrella who stopped him when he stumbled into Bond’s grasp, slightly tipsy and prepared with a sharp remark. It was the pain in her eyes that he saw when the agent’s supple mouth poised into a smile mere centimeters from his own Cheshire Cat snicker, and he twirled in the man’s arms, receiving an encouraging push onto the covers. Maybe 007 caught sight of her, too, and that is why he agreed to take first watch without so much as a grumble. But Q is beginning to rue it now, this pretense of sleep. It leaves entirely too much time for retrospection, and his memories are bound to outstay the lull of the wine.


	2. Chapter 2

If pressed, Q might admit to being flustered the next time he saw 007. Not that his return was unexpected – the whole of MI-6 was abuzz of Bond’s arrival and subsequent grounding. But the boffin was unprepared for his entrance in the way that one always feels harried and snuck-up upon by housewarming guests, and he might have been batty enough to start dusting if Q Branch wasn’t on the verge of perpetual disaster. As it happens, he was occupied all morning with outfitting the DB10 for 009, an effort that mainly consisted of adjusting the atmosphere system to cater to her musical preferences, which were, by a delightful coincidence, tackier than leopard print on plaid. Q further consoled himself against the mess by installing the atmosphere drive intended for 007 into the old Aston Martin, so there was hope yet that the rogue would be forced to outstrip his enemies to the tune of “Lipstick” by Jedward and other Eurovision classics.

At risk of inducing himself to laughter in the middle of his own lab, Q then busied himself with the pile of literature on his desk, careful to keep his manner unobtrusive. The merger with MI-5 and Denbigh’s surveillance initiative had put him in the uncomfortable position of being C’s greatest potential sympathizer in the secret service, and he could admit to a certain amount of strain on the morale of his department. Even Moneypenny had started breathing down his neck when she heard they were being put to work on new methods of leashing the agents. The scrutinizing looks he got now were contrary to those he had endured at the start of his tenure: there had been no patience for him when his colleagues presumed that he was an incompetent, an innocent with no stomach for blood; now, some of the double-ohs were persuaded that he would drink a gallon if it meant endearing himself to their new boss.

His face sunk in a biofuels textbook, Q felt an abrupt rap at his desk. “Yes, Bond… er, R,” he started, looking up. “Apologies, I was expecting 007. How may I help you, R?”

“Good morning, Q,” she offered him a sympathetic smile and a Scrabble mug of earl grey, which he accepted with his free hand. “Ms. Moneypenny was just looking for you. She said she had an item you requested and left me with this,” R held out what appeared to be a newly purchased litter box. Inside, the quartermaster examined a sticky note featuring a rough illustration of a man labelled as ‘LOO’ expressing his attraction to petulant dark curls and horn-rimmed glasses. He felt the pink rise in his cheeks.

“Ah, yes. I was expecting a… parcel from Ms. Moneypenny. Thank you, R,” Q favored her with a quick smile of his own, shuffling the biofuels book out of his left arm. And then he reconsidered that he should instead replace the mug of tea to his desk so he could keep reading. Finally, the boffin ended up balancing the cat box atop his book, with the earl grey still in his right hand, and it was in this moment that James Bond determined to stride through the elevator door.

He looked impeccable of course, and remarkably unruffled for a man who had just endured a severe telling-off from M, to say nothing of his ordeal in Mexico. Q opened his mouth to exclaim a greeting but managed to stop at the last second, having realized that he looked ridiculous and was still in mid-sip of his tea. 007, for his part, didn’t even glance Q’s way as he made for the rifle on his main desk. ‘Typical, typical ingrate,’ he thought. Collecting himself, the boffin slipped his book into the cat box and shoved them both under the chair, abandoning his steaming mug on the table. He emulated the confidence of the agent’s swagger as best he could.

“Ah, 007.”

Bond flipped the rifle over and over in his hands, not troubling to hide his admiration. “Q.”

“Please excuse the mess. Everything’s a little bit up in the air, what with the changes and all. A couple of things to get through…” Q swooped in slightly too fast, wrapping his fingers around the gun barrel, and he didn't expect the stubborn agent to relent. 

The metal, he noticed with astonishment, was warm to the touch and acrid with black gunpowder. In succession, two, three, five bullets tore over his shoulder, but he didn’t dare turn his head. Q wavered in the hot wind, digging his heel into what he assumed to be the ledge of a high terrace. All around 007 was a shimmering spectrum of yellows and reds. As the boffin felt his grip unravel, grappling forward, the ringing in his ears grew so loud that he couldn’t hear himself yelling out the agent’s name and begging him to cease fire before the kickback sent him plummeting. And then Bond relented; slowly, Q lowered the gun between them, feeling that he had promised something. “Um,” he breathed more than spoke, coming to out of a stupor, “S-shall we get started?”

Bond’s expression of disarmed placidity remained, and Q spun on his heel before the older man could see him chew his lip, under the distinct impression that he was being studied. “Follow me, if you please,” he called without looking behind. 

 

Tagging after him quietly, the agent was almost induced to a half-grin – almost, at the waif’s clear infatuation, but there was something startlingly earnest in those enormous hazel eyes that had stilled him. It was uncanny. Getting off the metaphorical ground, Bond adduced, would be much simpler than he had anticipated, but like all blessings he knew it would bite him in the back eventually.

The meandering trek to Medical gave him time to infer the quartermaster’s disposition. It was clear to Bond that the boffin had been rattled by his department’s new duties – gone was the brisk self-possession and detachment of their first meeting – and he seemed to have adopted a grey pallet, a grey pallor, and the stoop of somebody trying to remain inconspicuous. Given their present arrangement, 007 expected as much. But he also recognized in Q the sheer glimmer of a spy who was personally invested in his work: whatever it was that he was about to see had a palpable, nervous effect on the genius. He was twisting his fingers together like tentacles.

Bond watched the messy swirls of black hair break around his neck, and he wanted to believe that this change was innocuous. With Q in his sights, he had registered a confluent rush of vigor and serenity, like listening to a heartbeat, profoundly alone in the boffin’s attention. It was a moment that he could not assimilate into normal experience. Passing through the door of Medical, he saw Q divert to the glove dispenser, snapping blue latex over his hands before letting them come to rest on 007’s bicep. He noted how they lingered there, unapologetic but careful, soft.

“Christ! Q!”

“Prick. I said you may feel a prick,” the insolent turned up his sharp nose. “We’ve injected you with SmartBlood, to track your location. Still in its testing stages, but, uh, we should be able to read you on these sensors from any point on the globe.”

“Wonderful,” Bond blinked. “Just as I was doubting your Christmas spirit, you shoot me with the tracking beacon that never stops. I’ll make room for you in my closet, shall I?”

“There are a few more components to your outfit, 007, which I will be delighted to explain.”

“Q?”

“Yes, 007?”

“Are you building me a car out of a litter tray? Or just an exploding dog?”

Bond watched the quartermaster’s birdlike shoulders droop in a deep sigh. “It’s a cat litter tray. I’m moving in so I never have to part with your broken equipment.” Bond almost smiled despite himself. “Now, I’ve one more thing for you, if you’ll follow me,” and like that, the young man sauntered off, but not before prizing the injection device from his arm with delicate motions. Flexing his muscles experimentally, the agent made after him.

He had watched Q Branch change in the months since the Skyfall Incident. His impression of the boffins at that time was one of semi-regular office workers, arranged by columns in that painfully bright, frigid cellar. Only there was something grizzly about them since Boothroyd died, like they were prescients out of “Minority Report,” these dreadfully pale, drugged, wasted bodies in loose-hanging cardigans. Lines of incomprehensible ciphers scrolled in their glasses – even those without spectacles looked glazed over – while their hands twitched unconsciously on dark tablets. At the helm, 007 found their quartermaster to be the most pitiful sight of them all, cold and undernourished, brows always furrowed with concern. After M’s funeral, Bond came to look on him as a being that was superficially human, who frowned at vexations and made light attempts at humor, who was draped in patterns but characterless in his own flesh. Only such an entity could do what Q did, sending men into unspeakable peril with nothing but a gun and a radio, talking said men through their dying breaths.

On reflection, Bond realized as he took his place by Q’s side, he also cared for the young quartermaster who sat like a sentinel in that poorly-lit lair, waiting for his agents to come home. Months of verbal jousting had instilled in the double-oh a growing affection for the glimmers of eccentricity and the perfume of engine grease that clung to Q at all hours of the day and night, for the sass and the steady, quieting voice in his ear on missions. But the predominate half of his mind, the half that lived with eyes over his shoulder, was unsettled by these exchanges that inevitably filtered into his dreams: he stumbled through the alleyways of sleep, dark cameras watching him from every surface, Q’s impassive tone warning him of an untraceable menace, and Olivia Mansfield turned to dust in his hands. And he was right to be wary, because even as the ashes of Skyfall were still hot, his well-meaning quartermaster had been hard at work turning the agents’ blood into property of the state. So 007 couldn’t endure to think that he had anything deeper than an oath in common with the boffin…

 

“Magnificent, isn’t she?” Q heard himself quaver as he surveyed the thoroughly covetous agent. 

“And you’re giving her to 009.”

“Reassigning, 007. She was meant to be for you, until a certain exploit in Central America landed you in hot water with M. I am sorry, by the way. About what happened.”

“He’ll come around eventually.”

“I was referring to Estrella.” The quartermaster scanned his face, which betrayed no offense, before huffing another sigh. “I suppose you weren’t able to salvage any of the tech. If I say my cats ate the prototypes on our financial report one more time, do you think Mallory will try to have them killed?”

“You weren’t joking about the litter box?” Bond cocked his head.

“As it happens, not.” And with that, the boffin withdrew a phone from his pocket and held it out at 007’s eyelevel, activating the screensaver. Bond’s mouth flickered.

“Jesus, Q, that’s not a cat. That’s a country!”

“That’s Partridge, she’s a Ragdoll. And you can see Turing hiding in the upper right corner,” Q spilled defensively. Bond flashed him an amused smirk, and deflecting, the genius stammered on. “B-but, ah, what else was it I wanted to show you? Oh! Right, over there, um, to your right, we’re making progress on the DB6. Of course, you did leave us with nothing but a steering wheel. I believe I said, ‘Bring her back in one piece,’ not ‘Bring back one piece,’” Bond strolled on in disinterest while behind him Q erupted in giddy, over-caffeinated laughter. 

When he caught his breath, he sidled up to the double-oh, reaching again into his coat. Q slid a cool metal watch into Bond’s hand, who frowned at it, underwhelmed.

“Does it do anything?”

“It tells the time.” 007 rolled his eyes.

“Q, do one more thing for me,” Bond turned around suddenly, facing away from the DB10. Still standing beside his quartermaster, he peered out over the vista of tinkering minions. Several of them had broken for coffee and tea, while the rest seemed to be aggregated around smooth metal tables or vehicular husks, absorbed in their work. Tanner was nowhere to be seen. 

“What did you have in mind?” Q pursued steadily.

He almost groaned when 007 gave a dubious glance from side to side. “Make me disappear.”

The boffin hid a grimace. “Bond, as I’m sure you’re aware, I answer only to M. This M.” He gulped, quite unable to choke down a bitter feeling that he couldn’t characterize in a word: fear, guilt, suspicion, and the smallest shred of hope. “I want to honor Olivia Mansfield’s last wishes, sincerely I do. But any activities that might interfere with my loyalty to MI-6 are strictly… impossible. Please—” shutting his eyes, he continued in a whisper, “Please, do not jeopardize my career with another Mexico.” 

Q almost jumped when he felt a warm, sturdy hand ease against his knuckles and the agent’s low voice murmuring so close to his ear that his neck prickled: “Any help is appreciated, Quartermaster. And if you wouldn’t do it for me,” Bond’s fingers slid across his palm sadistically, “do it to protect your poor, frightened cats…”

Q sealed himself in the respiring darkness of a prolonged blink. This was surely Bond having a laugh at his expense. He was already tempted to do this for Mansfield’s sake, but she would have never asked him to compromise MI-6. There was no way he could acquiesce. “007.” Mallory was going to have his head. “The SmartBlood program is in development, and as such it is still… technically experimental. It wouldn’t be too unusual for our tracking capabilities to flag sometime in the next twenty-four – er, f-forty-eight hours,” he let out a sigh he didn’t know he was holding when Bond’s fingers traced over his wrist. The agent rewarded him with a sidelong grin, but Q prevailed gravely, pulling back to face him. “After that, the technology will work. Without fail. And the alarm on the DB10 is very loud, it should be mentioned. Do you understand?”

Bond looked him straight in the eye and said that he understood completely, stuttering Q into silence. “Well,” the quartermaster stared down his charge for a second time that day, the cogs in his head grinding over all the possibilities laid before him. More than usual, he sensed, this was going to be a trying week. “It’s been… lovely to see you again, 007. Lovely.”

 

For the first time in over seventy-two hours, Q stayed the night in his own flat. After feeding the cats and leaving a thank-you bouquet for his neighbors, the man settled onto his couch, resting his head against Turing’s chest. He liked to close his eyes and listen to the sound of purring, his poorly-circulated hands soaking in the warmth from Partridge’s thick fur. Sometimes he fell asleep with them curled around his head and awoke spitting hair out of his mouth, numerous white strands twisted into his own darker ones. Normally insistent on a reasonable degree of cleanliness, nothing cheered Q quite like his private horde of cat toys, food bowls, scratching posts, and whining felines accompanied by classical radio, which he left on to keep them soothed during his long absences. 

On evaluation, the quartermaster knew it was unhealthy that he kept so little company, and that it was not enough to live on a hope of Bond visiting him in the evenings. Bond would never come, and excepting movie nights with Moneypenny and R, the house stood empty most of the time. He had the occasional fling with Tanner to look forward to, and Bill really was a sweet man (and a generous cook), but more often than not Q found himself pacing around the kitchen with a cup of reheated soup in his palms, holding one-sided conversations with James.

“Oh, it’s all very casual for you to swagger in here, demanding my attention. ‘Q, I broke my earpiece seducing widows; can I have an exploding pen?’ ‘Q, I need another million-pound jet pack.’ ‘My darling quartermaster, I have a real hankering for some poisoned breath mints.’ ‘Oh boo! That oaf Mallory has grounded me, and of all the possible favors I could call in, I have decided to foist all my burdens onto your department and make you complicit in my crimes!’ Well, bloody thank you, 007! Thirty-three years old I am, and I’m going to rot in a cell for the next fifty because you wanted to test that rifle I lent you on some foreign bloke wearing a Halloween costume!

“Bloody typical, James. And I suppose you didn’t even look back when that hotel collapsed because you shot a bomb with bullets that I built. Yes, I know the woman was collateral, and I know you were stopping a terror attack, but the explosives went off, 007. I think the revelers were fucking terrified.

“Oh sod it, my soup’s gone cold. I go to the trouble of buying organic ingredients that I can’t even eat because you blow up bloody everything that I make.” And so forth.

In a peculiar turn of events, the quartermaster would find himself at home again early the next afternoon on sick leave, an offering of chilled champagne numbing his hand. It had taken a good half hour of screaming curses into Tanner’s scarf before he managed to walk to the tube station without hurting anyone. Tossing his keys at the ground, Q slumped onto the couch between Partridge and Turing, flipped on the news, and gulped the champagne straight out of the bottle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew finally done! I'll try to keep these coming on a reasonable schedule, but thanks in advance for your patience. And thank you to everybody who's read and commented: you are the best! :)


	3. Chapter 3

Femurs of white marble towered over Bond, and he wondered if the columns at the Museo della Civiltà Romana had always looked like that – before he had come, before M had died and he had slept through it, on whiskey bottles and take-out tins and yellow-rotten silk – or if it was only by consequence that they revealed their true faces. There was a black procession at the end of the hall, upon whom he was sleuthing and upon whom his shadow infringed, pale in the afternoon light. It consisted of a dozen or so men, clothed in dark suits, dyed leather gloves, and shaded glasses. They appeared to him in profile or with their backs turned. Gaining on them stealthily, it was only once he had come into view of the priest that 007 noticed they were all in orbit of a lone character, isolated in the center: the principal mourner, a graceful, imposing woman in tall sleek heels, stared straight out on the adjacent courtyard, her expression cloudy and unreadable.

The Rite of Committal was repeated against a high, alabaster sun. Casting a glance towards the yard, the agent took in a group of children larking around scowling busts of old statesmen, but the sound didn’t reach him: in his milieu, all remained hushed, severe, and sacrosanct. It seemed utterly counterpoised to the manner and place in which Sciarra had perished. And Bond wasn’t sure which the man might have preferred, not that it mattered now: to die in private and be celebrated in the streets, or to be thronged with crowds at his demise and then entombed like this, with an air of cold formality and heartless proceduralism. Apart from the mystery woman, the ceremony appeared thoroughly impersonal, though Bond’s instincts told him there was more to it that. The set of his jaw, already vaguely perplexed, grew fraught as he refocused on the funeral party: one of them he seemed to know. He was similar in age to 007, and among that dour crowd he emanated an exuberant, lively instability. If only he could see the man’s face… The head in question tilted to its side but remained obscure. The ceremony was breaking up.

Watching the men trickle back to their cars, placidly, imperiously, and as ever on guard, the blonde agent decided to bide his time. He had to make contact with this lady, Donna Lucia Sciarra he presumed, whose demeanor was so controlled and who seemed menaced by shadows, as if the burial was not her husband’s but her own. And he was beginning to suspect that it was – and worse, that he had been intended to see it, that it had all been styled and staged, carefully, for him. It was too painstakingly theatrical for an average threat. A show of dominance? A taunt?

Carob irises startled 007 from his musings as the woman, finally at liberty to depart, turned to confront him. She did so with fierce dignity. The fine features of her visage stunned Bond, even at that distance: her lips, which seemed both proud and morose; her long eyelashes that hid deep, guileless eyes; the lines of worry carving her cheeks. She suspended the agent in her stare for several seconds, wherein Bond felt the harsh, prying hands of her scrutiny. And then, with a small flick of her wrist, the widow vanished, leaving him to wave the last of her bodyguards away coolly. 

 

Q nestled his head into the crook of his elbow as the last minion bade him goodnight. The glow from the SmartBlood map saturated his avian frame, brightest among its colors a tiny blue dot, winking merrily against his drooping eyelids. 007 was in Rome, and though he had never been, the quartermaster could almost picture the grandeur of the setting, the arcane monuments and glamorous women, glittering rivers. The intrigues involving Bond seemed to lead him naturally to such places. Where did he feel most at home, Q wondered: in high society or in seclusion? He could never be satisfied to have one without the other, if his mission reports were any indication. For himself, the quartermaster liked to imagine Bond on the beach, because it was there he had run to with Vesper Lynd, and it was there he had returned from the dead. Icarus couldn’t do what 007 had done, resurrected from the sea, gathering scars on his golden skin in exchange for another life. Q considered it a form of light entertainment to dream of his fabulous exploits, and it was all a comedy so long as the legend lived. Fortunately, on this particular night, his fancies did not lull him into sleep too soon, and the boffin had just enough time to cut the monitor before Tanner stepped out of the elevator. 

He yawned, pretending he had just awoken. “Good evening – good morning, Mr. Tanner.”

“Q,” the man strolled up to him and started rubbed his back good-naturedly, “don’t let me disturb you.”

He lowered his head again, exhausted but grinning. Q wasn’t sure what he had done to deserve a friend like Bill, and in these comfortable interludes between them, he was simply too happy to worry about it. “Bill, you are an angel from heaven, and never let it be said otherwise.” Tanner laughed cheerily and shifted up to massage his scalp. “How disastrous is it on the top floor?”

“Could be worse. For now, not much has changed. Denbigh’s on edge about the vote, though he seems bloody confident he’ll get his way in the end. M’s just glad that Bond is laying low,” Q suppressed a snort, “and me, well, I can almost remember a time when MI-6 was only in the Seventh Circle of Hell. Less paperwork then.”

“Where are we now?” Q asked with his eyes shut. “Eighth or Ninth?”

Tanner leaned his head down thoughtfully, putting a little more weight into his work. “That depends on how rotten Denbigh is.”

Q cracked one eye on his companion. Despite their thirteen years of acquaintance – and Bill often laughed at that, telling Q he didn’t look old enough to have endured thirteen years of anything – and for all that the strain was creased into the wrinkles around Tanner’s eyes, and for all that time he spent lying on the floor doing his preposterous back stretches, the quartermaster only saw the young man who had sat in the big black conference chair beside Olivia Mansfield, staring across the table at him like a birdwatcher who had just found a rare species of egg broken against the pavement. It had been the boffin’s first night back in London after four years abroad, and he had spelled it out for Tanner on their way to Medical, none too subtly: four years of despair that had nearly consumed him, four years of sleeplessness, of guilt and of boredom interspersed with terror, of taking his tea without sugar. When he awoke the next afternoon, Bill had left a satchel of sugar and a box of earl grey on his bedside table.

They shared a compatible silence before Q, stirring carefully, patted Bill’s hand and swiveled in his chair to face him. Tanner steadied the boffin as he stood. “Bill, M dismissed you hours ago, didn’t he?” He paused reverently. “And then you paced around your office. Probably caught a nap on Moneypenny’s sofa. R brought you a mug of tea, and you thought about turning it down. You’re bothered, what with Denbigh at our throats. To the extent that your office is in disarray: I’ll hazard a whole stack of mission reports is sitting a little too centrally on your desk. A couple of smudged signatures. A positive maelstrom of slightly bent paperclips, cluttering their trays in sorted, even quantities.” Bill smiled. The quartermaster edged forward then, stroking his friend’s shoulders. “Tell me: do you have the night off? Are you going straight to sleep?”

The sounds of mirth filtered into Tanner’s living room before the light did, and Q, slightly dizzy with giggling, allowed his friend to guide him by the arm over the threshold. On the tube, Bill had recounted a story of how Bond once surfed on a tidal wave with nothing but a board, a yellow parachute, and his God-given wits, and for the first time all day the boffin was warm from laughter and thoroughly relaxed. He fell onto the couch, kicking off his shoes and taking in the cozy familiarity he had with this room, from the empty Perrier bottles that passed for mantelpiece décor to the matted brown throw rugs in the entryway. The coffee table, Q could verify, was a recent addition, although already slightly chipped. If it seemed that Tanner kept his home with well-worn charm, one had only to enter his kitchen to see the other side, the element of Bill’s nature that was pristine. Q raked a hand through his hair and waited for his friend to rejoin him on the couch, and he felt almost giddy, pulling Bill into his lap, lips stinging with cheeky bites and alcohol. 

He wasn’t bothered about being the exception, rather than the rule, to Bill’s tastes: quite the contrary, this set him at ease. After years of curious, lingering stares and cooking dinners together, he had finally worked up the nerve to ask Tanner if there was a reason they hadn’t kissed already, and that had been it. Naturally, he had told Bill about his feelings for Bond, and Bill had told Moneypenny, and Moneypenny had told him that Tanner was quite fond of 009. He nuzzled into his friend’s neck, breaking his voice against the blushing flesh. And it was fun like this – it was fun. He could take the same ironic delight in shagging his mutually lovesick friend as he did in his nights watching pretentious art films with Moneypenny and R, as he did in curling up with his cats in front of the news. Sometimes, when he daydreamed or conversed with the James of his imagination, it made him laugh, and the fact of laughing alone in his office at 3 AM sent him into further hysterics. And Bond kept riding off into the sunset with the most emotionally unavailable people, and he kept coming home in a body bag before rising from the slab, and that was fun, too. Q had long since expended his wildest fantasies about knowing James personally, or being known. 007 was indefectible, superhuman, an Adonis with flaxen hair, Dionysus among his Bacchae, a phoenix riddle, a myth – and so long as he was, Q couldn’t even be a comrade to him, only a utility. Any Q would do.

Up until that moment, as a favor to M Mansfield, he had left certain corners of his heart undusted and certain threads uncut: tempted though he was, Q's gallivanting off on a revenge quest would have been worse than irrelevant if it interfered with state security. Anyway, the boffin maintained that he had given himself to the right people. Aged twenty, he had decided that MI-6 was what mattered, and year by year he bothered to learn the agents’ names and personalities – he had even covered some of their background checks, before he was Q – and he bugged them and tracked them and radioed... and they died all the same. Though when they died, their little blue dots remained: and that, in a word, was what Q often thought of his legacy, too see where the casualties fell. Their designations carried on of course, which the boffin found a comforting if peculiar mode of return, as if many bodies were passing through the same central character: M was a woman, and now she was a man; Q had been R, and R had been a technician; Q had been old, and now he was young. Once, even 007 had been different. Their collective odyssey through life, death, and rebirth was on the MI-6 memorial wall, where he had often sat in contemplation when an agent didn’t come home. And then Silva destroyed it. Now, aged thirty-three, the quartermaster began to think that he was looking for names in the wrong places. 

Some time later, crawling under the bedsheets for a reprieve that they both knew was too brief, a half-lucid Q mumbled indistinctly: “Bill, what shoul’ I do? I wouldn’ ‘ave made Sm’Blood if I knew I wa’ han’ing it to Sat’n h’ms’f. I wou’dn’ make a pen f’ Denbigh. ‘enbigh prob’bly doesn’t ev’n like pens. Bond likes pens, ‘e always wan’s pens…”

“My advice?” Tanner tucked an extra pillow over Q’s nodding head. “If you don’t do the Devil’s work, you’ll never end up working for him.”

 

It was 7’o’clock sharp. At a distance, Bond followed Donna Sciarra through her front door, flanking a pair of wraiths who were trailing her. He couldn’t be sure if the lady knew that he had come – she left him no indication, her manner as opaque as it had been several hours before – but she knew that the gunmen were there, gliding on rubber soles. With rehearsed finesse, she switched on her record player, poured herself a double brandy, and floated down the central hallway towards the garden, redoubling Bond’s eerie feeling. Obscured by a black evening dress, her brunette hair swept over her shoulder, the sole point of light at the end of the path was a triangle of uncovered skin on her neck.

The night closed around Donna Sciarra, making her silhouette indistinct from the surrounding pools of water and starlight. 007 felt certain she could have walked without touching the ground. At the edge of the fountain, the woman stopped in her tracks and winced when two gunshots pierced the dark air behind her, and he thought of Severine falling again, the glass and ice and blood crushed into the stones; and he saw himself holding M, too late, too slow, grey hair turning gold in the dying, alchemical light from Skyfall. Only this time he didn’t missed. Everything stopped but the trickle and hum of the fountain. At the end of the path, Donna Sciarra breathed out and, when she deduced that she was alive, turned around sharply. 

When she spoke, her voice sounded disused. “You – what have you done? Are you crazy?”

“It has been said,” Bond flashed her a smirk, bending to secure the henchmen’s weapons. “How long until there are more?”

“You were at the funeral. You see it: I am already dead. Why do you come here when you know everything he wants you to know?”

“And what does he want me to know?” Bond stepped into her vicinity, placing his hands on Sciarra’s arms reassuringly. “How long until these men were to report back?”

“Four hours.” The lady took a melancholy sip of her glass.

“Good,” he concluded checking his watch, which he had forgotten to set to the time in Rome, and then offered his arm, “then there’s still time for a drink.” She took it, and passing along the shadows of flora and far-off groves, 007 waited for Donna Sciarra to engage him. The woman blinked heavily. 

“My husband… was not in Mexico to plant a bomb,” she kept her eyes locked ahead. “His identity was revealed. He was sent to Mexico City to die. Even you move as his master wants you to move, mister…”

“Bond. James Bond.” Sciarra nodded.

“You are his executioner.”

“I just killed two of his assassins.”

“He wouldn’t care if you killed a thousand of his men. Tetricus is trying to meet you, face to face.”

“Tetricus?” Bond scoffed. “Why?” To this, Donna Sciarra brushed her hair behind her ear, considering.

“Maybe he thinks you will help him. Don’t look so surprised,” she led 007 up the steps to her villa. “Men change.” 

Sciarra’s bedroom reflected a warmth and intimacy that Bond hadn’t anticipated. The scheme was all in cream, azure, and red: plush, rust-colored couches; off-white lamp shades; blue metal lamp bases carved in the design of angels; topaz carved in the design of kings. Intricate frescos of marine life and flowers ornamented the walls, which were the same white-chocolate shade as the curtains. Besides these, a silver candelabrum stuck out from the back corner of the room, and each wall contained several gold-tinged mirrors. Retreating to one of these panels, the woman began pouring 007 a glass of brandy.

“My husband’s associates are meeting tonight at the EUR. That is what you came to ask me, isn’t it?” She spun around, keeping the glass close to her chest. “His gunmen would have told you. You should have allowed me to die.”

“And pass on the enchantment of your conversation?”

He obtained the brandy from Sciarra’s grasp, and she stood stark still, watching him. “You are playing a dangerous game, Mr. Bond. Are you trying to seduce me?”

“You have impeccable instincts.”

“But I have already told you all I know.” She shook her head. “I have never learned Tetricus’ real name. My husband never consulted me. What he did, I have guessed for myself. Before Mexico, he wouldn’t look at me.”

“Then he’s a fool.” For the first time, Bond saw Donna Sciarra smile weakly. He approached her again. “I have a favor to call in with an old friend,” the double-oh recounted casually, swirling his drink. The grin reaching her eyes this time, she recovered his glass and placed it beside her own on a nearby dresser, permitting him to close the distance. “When I leave you at the American embassy, ask for Felix. Tetricus’ men will be… occupied for the next couple of hours. Although not with such intoxicating company.”

Donna Sciarra assented against his lips, and backing up with him into bed, she took a moment to face the agent solemnly. “We are agreed,” she whispered, “But I warn you, Mr. Bond: you are going to a place where there is no mercy.”

The agent kissed away her caution, and they said no more. He saw it as signing a contract, choosing to trust each other with lives that were woefully uncertain, day by day. There was solace in that, however forcefully his psychological training activated in the back of his mind: allowing himself these moments of idle, unnecessary sex in the field (which is to say, sex that wasn’t for the purpose of gathering intelligence) felt like a rebellion, a re-assertion of his humanity and his dignity against work that often degraded both. Nor did Bond find it unpleasant, revealing by degrees Sciarra’s magnetic beauty which seemed in the nude even more majestic and self-assured, like the North Star overtaking Night’s sky. But in another corner of his thoughts, even as he welcomed her embrace, James was beset again by the red-rimmed, blue-green remembrance of Vesper Lynd.

Closing his eyes, sometimes he still felt as if, when he opened them again, he should find her sitting there, smiling over him, having watched him sleep. Her impish smile, her green dress, her gaze that was narrowing out the tears, all were remarkably more present to him than much of his life as an agent had been. It seemed to Bond that she would have lived if he had only looked at her more closely and never allowed her out of his sight; or if Vesper had to die, she might have been reborn after all if he had only blinked. In his heart, he held onto the mad hope that she would be.

And it struck Bond all at once why Q’s expression had disarmed him, those sparky yet gentle eyes flicking up to challenge his. In so many ways, there was scarcely a resemblance between the quartermaster and Vesper; they might even be antitheses. Vesper had been warm whereas he was cool and calculating, sun-kissed whereas the boffin was exhausted and ghost-pale. His lover had been fresh, in a word, summery – and Q was a quiet winter: blank and subdued, steeped in crisp white and deep blues and browns and greys; he was pretty, but he tried to disguise it; he could be bright, phosphorescently bright, but only when he failed to suppress it. It was enough to make Bond curious that summer and winter could share a way of looking at him. And if, as all the tension left his body, his awareness wandered to that twittering laugh, to the sound of his own name wrapped in murmurous inflections, Q’s aspect genuine like a white rose opening… Perhaps it was only that he had not seen it before, nor would have thought to.

Bond rolled out from under the covers and picked up his clothing scattered about the mirrored room. Donna Sciarra had already roused herself, and sometime in his reverie had slipped into black lingerie. In the reflections she posed, tracking him with her eyes, statuesque: it must have been her sense of poetry, James thought, to do something as fleeting and unuttered for the sake of beauty. 

“Somebody loves you back home.” Bond turned towards Donna Sciarra, who was studying him from the bed, rich mahogany hair pooling over her shoulder. 

“I have my admirers,” he grinned dismissively.

“No,” she considered the agent slowly, arms folded. “No. An elegant new car, just the right shade to bring out your eyes. A glow in your cheeks. A beautiful watch,” she nodded to his wrist, “that runs exactly on London time. You have the look of a man who is loved, Mr. Bond. A wife?” He shook his head, and the lady pursed her lips understandingly. “Whoever she is, she must be very brave to love you.”

James turned back towards the mirror but fixed his eyes on Donna Sciarra, unable to break the woman’s gaze. 

 

Q sat in the terminal, crossing and uncrossing his legs, waiting for the sedative to kick in. Before he disabled the SmartBlood program, the quartermaster had traced 007 to an Alpine ski resort in Austria called the Ice Q (did he do this on purpose?), and he vowed under his breath that if there was so much as a scratch or even an unreasonable quantity of snow on his DB10, it would be a long way down for James Bond. The gate attendants called his section, and Q stood weakly, powering down his laptop. And being afraid of flying, he considered on a reflex that this could all be for the last time: the last strand of code, the last rogue act of a quartermaster, his last plea that the agent would never hear. What was it about Bond that made him worth dying for? Lust was not enough, nor was gravity, and Q chewed his lip as he contemplated all the women and men he could ask when he joined them. Perhaps there was a whole province in purgatory set aside for those who had sacrificed themselves for 007, and after a few hundred years of penitence and frustration he would understand. 

Q turned towards the news screen, which was flickering silently at the other end of the gate, and he squinted. There was an image of a river, with the words “Rome” and “car crash” running in a banner at the bottom of the frame. He opened and closed his mouth. In the next shot, a crane was dredging up an unmistakable silver Aston Martin, water cascading out of its decimated husk. And then the sedative kicked in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Already hard at work on the next chapter! Looking forward to reuniting Bond and Q soon :)


	4. Chapter 4

Suddenly he was conscious of the cool spray of wet sand, its jagged texture on his hips, his lips, scuttling over his scalp. The light against his eyelids was so direct that it overwhelmed him, and when Q tried to pry apart his fused lashes, he was confronted with an abyssal sloshing of indigo that sunk in through his skull and down his throat like castor oil. Despite the beat of the sun, under his clothes, the boffin felt a clammy chill. The air was pungent with hot brine and ash. 

And something continued to shower him with the fine particles of limestone and crushed shells, Q noted, but not as aimlessly as the wind. It was as if he was burrowing, although he hadn’t moved. A musky membrane of grime was spreading over his torso and piling in rifts by his sides, hands, and ears. He had a roaring headache, and licking over his lips, Q could taste the raw, starchy beginnings of a sunburn. Though the back of his mind was still tugging at oblivious sleep, just as the young man felt himself drifting away, he was called to by a squeaking, gritting, crackling… something. Q couldn’t be sure. It sounded a little like the squeal of tires on asphalt, this incongruous sound. Slowly and with a dreadful heaviness in his limbs he stirred, rubbing out his brittle eyelashes as an even greater heap of sand fell over him. Q puffed, opening his mouth to protest. 

The man who stood over him, wearing an oddly constricted, joyless smile, was tall, slightly lumbering, and blonde. He had a white flower in his lapel. Q blinked back his astonishment at the unconventional picture this man made as he loomed there in the middle of the beach, dressed in formal black, wisps of bleached hair rising in the sea breeze. He had a square, firm jaw that gave away far less than the coy checked pattern of his shirt, which was orange and blue. In spite of his strangeness, Q had to admit that the man had a certain magnetism which he found intriguing, perhaps even desirable. His mouth had gone dry.

The figure tapped the end of his cigarette, flicking down a clump of ash to land on Q’s towel. His expression was still pursed. “I am sorry, sweet. I had to wake you.” The boffin shifted his hips until he was lying on his side, and he scanned the Spaniard as he spoke. “You reminded me of the boys who used to live on my grandmother’s island. They would bath in the sun all day, stretched out under her coconut trees.”

“Oh?” Q was at a loss.

“Yes,” the man continued, “they were exactly like you, even as you look at me now. You see, I would go to the island to see my nana every summer, and these boys started to expect me. When they saw my boat, they would call out my name. ‘Raoul!’ they would call from the shore –”

“I see.”

“You should not to interrupt me,” Raoul’s green-grey eyes turned cold. Q told himself he would have retorted at this impertinence if only his mouth was not still dry, and if only he had not found himself unable to swallow. The while, the Spaniard carried on with his tale. “One summer, when I was sleeping in my nana’s house, I heard a little sound at my window. A little ‘tap, tap, tap,’ coming from the outside. And when I opened my curtains, what do you think I saw,” he didn’t wait for an answer, “but the youngest of the boys, sweet Anso, sitting in a coconut tree. He begged me to open my window and let him inside.

“You must be wondering what brought Anso to me in the middle of the night. What could have been so serious to an island boy who relaxed in the sun all day? I will tell you. Anso had a secret with his older brother – Aldo – who often came to him in the early morning, before dawn. He was a very bad boy, and he used to ask Anso for… lurid… favors.” An unconscious ‘oh’ passed Q’s lips, but Raoul paid him no mind, raising his arms to the level of his eyes. “So we made a plan. That morning, when Aldo came looking for his brother, Anso was waiting for him beneath a coconut tree. And when he wouldn’t leave…” Raoul threw down his hands suddenly. “A coconut fell on his head. We think it was instantaneous, as the English say.

“I tell you this,” the man laughed, looking at Q for the first time in several minutes – smiling unblinkingly at the visibly scandalized youth. “I tell you this because, being at the seaside again, and seeing you lying in the sand… it is as if I am with Anso again on that night. He was so pliant, after his brother died. He needed me to love him,” Raoul breathed as if to continue but thought better of it, cocking his eyebrow at the coolly ponderous young man.

Q scrutinized Raoul with dark, crustaceous eyes, chewing his lip. “I’m sixteen,” he tried to keep his voice impassive. At this, the man bore his teeth reverently, as a cat might when savoring the sight of its still-struggling prey before it gnashes through the skull.

“Am I so obvious?” The Spaniard trailed Q’s thighs with his gaze, wetting his lips flagrantly. “No. It isn’t me. My tastes… are always discreet. This is your doing, darling. What a delectably clever boy you are.”

“You’re not at all discreet,” Q spat back, inwardly recoiling, fixing his eyes on the man’s dress shoes. Noticing his sudden reticence, the stranger shifted his feet suggestively.

“How would it feel, hmm?” Raoul glanced down with the slightest twitch of excitement. “If we take them off together? And we could use them to make a little bruise, right there,” he eyed the spot below Q’s hip, “and there,” along Q’s outstretched legs. 

“I’m n—not interested.”

“No choice, I’m afraid. Little cygnet,” Raoul practically licked. “You can hide many things, but not the flush of skin, and the bob of a throat, and the curl of your toes. Like Anso, it is your natural reaction. To men. And now, to me.”

“I’m going to count to ten,” Q levelled quietly, “and then you’re going to explain why you’re chatting up someone half –” he squinted, “a third of your age on a public beach.” 

“And Mommy and Daddy will come.” Raoul nodded despondently, a sheen forming over his eyes. Q glanced past his shoulder to their lime green set of chairs, where his parents were still reclining. “Don’t look at them,” the lilted tones resumed somberly. “Don’t look at anyone but me.” The boffin shivered and obeyed. He wouldn’t have called it a choice: it just seemed, in that moment, that so long as this Minotaur was watching him there was nowhere else he could have looked, not in the entire world.

The Spaniard curled his lips approvingly. “That’s it. And we will go now. Together. Fold up your towel. Tie it around yourself. And – and look at you! After lying so long in the sun, you are hungry, hmm? And thirsty. And soon you will drink and eat. Now listen to – don’t do that.” Jolted out of his complacency by panic, Q darted to his feet, and as he tore past his captor the boy heard that languorous voice groaning with frustration behind him. “Mommy and Daddy are very tired. Can’t you see they are sleeping? Little cygnet. Listen to –”

Flying across the sand, Q counted the steps to his parents’ chairs. One, two, three, four, five, six, and he shook Raoul from his arm, the towel falling from his waist into a crumpled heap with the sun cream. He sprinted, although the terrain antagonized him at every stride. Ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen. Still several yards away, their limbs were hanging limp over the ground: this much he could discern and not more. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. There was more, and his mind went blank. Twenty-one, twenty-two. He didn’t realize he was screaming until he stood at his parents’ side, and his father’s tongue was lolling, and the sea air was as pneumonic in his throat as if it was caught in a sail. His mother had drooped over the edge of her seat, her long hair brushing the sand. Q was shocked by this, but even more shocked by that barest recognition that they were still alive, in that moment when the Spaniard’s toes touched his heels, and an arm snaked around his chest, and his neck pricked.

 

007 warmed his hands in the pockets of his black winter coat; scanning from the eminence of the sun down to the smallest crystals of snow, to the array of white-cushioned couches and chairs in the Ice Q’s foyer, the Alps lay perfectly desolate before him. Between his left thumb and forefinger was the ring Mr. White had given him, cold to the touch and ridged with its black insignia. Mulling over his intention to analyze it – and the inevitability of involving his quartermaster in this scheme – gave Bond pause for the first time since he had set foot in Rome. Nothing bode well of it. The horizon was traced with a thin, faded line that resembled the parting of jaws. Already his stay in Austria had ended badly for Mr. White, and it might do the same for Q, and it had cost him his word to protect the old criminal’s daughter, one Madeleine Swann – and yet, Bond considered, checking the time, he would sacrifice more, much more, for his M. 

The face that reflected in his watch was grizzled, showing its age as sandy blonde gave way to silver and slate. He wore a perpetual scowl that faltered, in rare interludes, into a self-satisfied smirk. And it was 11:02 AM, still much too early (or marginally too late) to wonder what might have become of that man had Vesper lived, or had his parents lived, or had he not waited so long to indulge in wondering. 11:03. If the doctor was punctual, this gave him two minutes to work out what he could say of her father’s death. Bond held his stance, held his stare into the jutting, barren visage of the Alps, with the agitating sense that circumstance would confound him at every turn, as it always had. It was time for a drink.

Bond was brought back by the hum of a sliding door to his right. “Please excuse my tardiness,” came a smooth French accent.

The agent turned, grinning graciously, and said nothing as Dr. Swann sat and gestured for him to sit. “I have been going over your file, Mr. Bond, but to understand the nature of your injury I must ask you a few more questions. Please answer as specifically as possible,” she recited, glancing at him courteously. “What is your occupation?”

“Monk. It’s Brother James, please.”

“Forgive my skepticism, Brother.”

“You are forgiven,” he replied, giving up the game. “I’m a contractor of sorts.”

“I see. And does your work require physical exertion or regular cardiovascular activity?”

“Infrequently.” Dr. Swann disguised her annoyance.

“Can you detail for me what your diet consists of on a typical day? What sorts of foods do you eat frequently? Do you consume alcohol or smoke?”

“Well, if we’re talking about last night, there was a lot of brandy involved.”

“And were you this exasperating? Because I recommend anything to dull the edge.” Dr. Swann leaned forward. “Are you trying to waste my time, Mr. Bond?”

Now he really needed a drink. “Not this time, I’m afraid, Ms. Swann. I’m here to fulfill a promise I made to you father.”

“No. How dare you mention him in my presence?”

“Listen to me.”

“What, did he tell you that I am some disgrace? Because I refuse to follow in his footsteps?”

“No,” Bond felt himself growing impatient. “Dr. Swann –”

“What could he possibly have had to say about me?”

“He asked me to protect you.”

“And why do I suddenly need his protection?”

“Because he’s dead,” Bond grated out. “I’m sorry.”

Her eyes flickered with hurt, and the woman waited for several seconds before speaking again. “What happened?”

The agent told her. He began with his arrival in Innsbruck, where he had picked up the trail to her father’s refuge east of Speicher Finstertal. “And what about when you saw him?” The house had been unlit and in disrepair, and cluttered with furniture pieces, food packaging, and television components. There was heat but little insulation. Mr. White was hiding – or perhaps wasting away – in a hidden studio, a frail figure engulfed by flashing news broadcasts. His eyes were beady and unseeing. “But what did he have to say?” That he was being poisoned. That he had run aground, run with the wrong people and tried too late to back away. He had thought Bond was there to finish the job, but he didn’t have to. Mr. White made him swear to protect Madeleine and then pulled the trigger himself. “And that was everything? That was all?” That was all.

She slumped back in her seat, looking perturbed. “What can you tell me about the men your father worked for?” Bond tried. “Anything you remember him saying? Any time they may have contacted you?” Madeleine shook her head unwillingly.

“Excuse me, Mr. Bond. My father is dead, and now you wish to interrogate me? We weren’t close,” she stood without looking at him, activated the door, and waited for the agent to leave. “I need – I need to think.”

Bond decided it was better to wait out her inner conflict than to trigger it. He zipped up his coat and listened to the door whir shut behind him.

Making his way down the glass staircase into the Ice Q’s main lobby, 007 considered where he might purloin a bottle of whiskey, or at least of wine, without too much grief. There was room service, but he felt certain that the resort would insist he wait until lunch, and besides he preferred to keep an eye on Dr. Swann, who had occupied herself with pacing the foyer and throwing sharp glares in his direction. He might find something in their gift shop. But then the double-oh spotted a bar and allowed himself a sigh of relief. 

“Whiskey. No ice,” Bond leant on the clear countertop and rolled the metal ring in his hand. Calling Moneypenny was no longer an option – her phone had been deactivated – and so he was left with the necessity of contacting Q. Somehow. His forty-eight hours off the radar were ticking away, and he didn’t have a dream of eluding MI-6’s online surveillance well enough to talk to the quartermaster privately. A letter to his residence was out of the question. A phone call would be as hopelessly self-incriminating as an email, but then, what did he have to lose? Madeleine might never talk, and if she didn’t, this ring was his only lead.

“I’m sorry, sir, but we don’t serve alcohol at this bar.”

“Of course you don’t,” he griped back. “Well, is there another bar? You know, the kind that serves drinks?” The bartender averted his eyes helplessly and said there was not. He went on to explain that the Ice Q was renowned for its health shakes and juices, such as the Red Berry Vitamin Infusion, and the Bean and Vegetable Amino Acid Blend, and the Peanut Butter Banana Fitness Shake, and the Plum and Blueberry Fiber Boost, and the Passion Fruit Vitamin C Monster, and – 

“He’ll have your Probiotic Green Protein Acai and Kale Smoothie… I so worry about him.” A crisp, familiar voice woke Bond from behind.

 

The quartermaster felt a smile quirk over his lips, but he fought it down, taking his place by the agent’s side at the bar. “Lovely to see you again, 007,” he deadpanned.

“Q?” Bond had lowered his voice. His expression was still, and it was like this that Q knew he had startled the double-oh.

“In your ear, as usual.”

“And on my back, as always,” Bond reached for his glass but seemed to remember what was in it just before taking a sip. “Mallory decide I needed child supervision?”

“M doesn’t know I’m gone,” the boffin turned to look Bond in the eyes. “He doesn’t know where you are, either.”

“But he’ll know soon enough.”

Q chewed his lip. “You’re referring to SmartBlood. He may have trouble accessing it at the bottom of the Thames. Of course, if he does manage to find my computer, the hard drive will have to air-dry for a bit. But I hear that putting it in rice helps.”

The agent edged forward, smirking conspiratorially. “Q… how on earth did you manage that?”

“What, sinking millions of pounds worth of equipment to the bottom of a river? I could ask you the same thing.” The quartermaster crossed his arms, suddenly remembering the terrible image of his car hanging in shambles over the Tiber.

A warm palm came to rest on his arm, and Q looked up at the still-grinning agent. “She outran a Jaguar, Q,” Bond paused sentimentally. “Atmosphere system could have been improved, though.”

The quartermaster frowned. “You’ll recall, 007, that the DB10 wasn’t yours. Agent Adeyemi sends her regards, by the way. She’s taken up in your flat with a shotgun.”

“MI-6 recovered her, didn’t they? Minions will have her repaired in no time.” 007 shrugged unapologetically.

“I really, really hate you right now,” Q groused softly, but there was not bite to it. He had reprimanded the double-oh all he intended to. In fact, he felt renewed – the melodrama of the previous days had melted off of him. Perhaps it was the effect of being in the field.

Bond kept glancing up at the foyer, and Q turned his head curiously. There was a young woman with blonde hair tied in a businesslike ponytail marching to and fro behind the glass, casting expectant looks in the agent’s direction. The boffin closed his eyes and sighed: naturally Bond had managed to involve a woman half his age in this, whatever this was. “Listen, Q, I have something for you,” 007 started speaking closer to his ear than he had remembered him being. “I’ll meet you in your room in an hour, but in the meantime, I need you to learn all you can about this.” He withdrew a metal ring from his pocket and slid his hand into Q’s, letting it linger there a moment before returning to the boffin’s arm.

The landscape of blue in 007’s eyes was quite striking in that proximity. Q’s focus darted between every micro-shade of his irises, from ice-crystal azure to turquoise to tropic shore cyan. “Third floor. Room 325.”

“Thank you, Q.” Squeezing his arm, Bond leaned in, placing a kiss on the boffin’s cheek, and then walked past him to the stairs. 

It was the quartermaster’s turn to be startled, but he decided to save his questions for an idle moment. Throwing his head back to ensure Bond had returned to the foyer, Q fished into his bag for a coat and hat as he moved with purpose, scoping out the elevator back to his suite. The Ice Q’s lifts, like the rest of the building’s constitution, were a cool combination of glass and polished steel. It made the boffin shiver to look at it, but then, he had been shivering since he stepped off the plane in Austria. 

He sidestepped a little girl in a puffy, too-large winter jacket and pulled his own comparatively flimsy windbreaker tighter. The compartment ahead of him was blessedly empty. Plunking down on one of the benches, he pulled out his laptop and set about analyzing the ring for all he could find: mineral composition, microscopic cracks, brands and markings, that bleak, birdlike insignia. He kept rubbing his cheek. Why did it feel so hot? And then he’d remember and double into his work again.

When the ring finished scanning he tipped it into his own pocket, thumbing it just to be sure. It was lukewarm. Closing the sensor drive, he looked up to find that he was no longer alone in the lift. Sitting together on the opposite bench were two men in black suites, observing him vacantly. Q flashed his eyes back down. The lift continued its ascent, reflections of reflections of the Alps dispersing around him until it seemed that the walls had shattered, leaving him entirely prone. He shifted his feet and stole another look at the men. The elevator rocked lightly in the wind. 

And they climbed and climbed into the blank, callous sky. Q shifted again, and this time his soles squealed against the metal floor. He hunched into his computer; the men watched him silently. In his peripheral vision, the boffin scanned them for any obvious knives and guns, and he decided that they were likely unarmed or carrying tranquilizers. He bunched up his shoulders, satisfied that his collar was high and thick enough to give him an advantage against needles. All this augured well, except that between the two of them he would easily be overpowered, and he could expect nothing by way of assistance – from Bond or MI-6 – for at least forty-five minutes. And the men were beginning to fidget, rubbing together their thick leather gloves.

The boffin’s mouth opened and closed. He folded down his laptop carefully, trying not to alarm his pursuers or betray emotion of any kind. His eyes, normally autumnal browns and greens, tinged black like a forest at night. The men gauged him as he stowed his computer. The lift crept up ever so slowly. When it reached the threshold of the residential building, they passed through a dark interstice, and Q’s hand clamped around his bag until his knuckles turned white. The three passengers were now staring at each other directly, without pretense. The doors opened, and no one moved. A throng of skiers poured in, and Q was paralyzed. They had reached the landing, and one of the men breathed in slowly through his nostrils, and breathed out, pouring out his contempt.

“Cygnus.”

Q lunged for the door, scrambling through the crowd as he only just managed to squeeze himself and his bag through an assortment of shocked tourists. He bolted down the hall, and reaching the end, spun around a sharp corner. He was being followed – he didn’t know how closely. Every sound was immediate, as if it was all playing out just over his shoulder and breathing down his neck. Thirty-eight minutes was all he had to survive alone. What an inconsequential amount of time – he would run for thirty-eight hours if he had to – and yet how abandoned he felt without his gadgets, his agents, the minions and Moneypenny and Tanner. He slammed around another corner, and another. He thought he heard that scratchy voice echoing off every wall: “Cygnus, Cygnus.” Scraping into a branch off the main hallway, Q threw himself into what looked to be a janitor’s closet and sealed the door, and he was plunged into perfect darkness. He muffled his breaths with his sweater and waited.

 

Madeleine glided ahead of 007, being more familiar with the layout of the Ice Q’s suites than he. Under normal circumstances, Bond might have occupied himself with admiring her features – she had the sort of grace Veronica Lake did, with high, intelligent cheeks and golden-blonde hair, to say nothing of the way she seemed to flow when she walked – but like the aftertaste of that godawful drink Q had ordered for him earlier, Donna Sciarra’s warnings were on his tongue, and they bore repeating. Q had appeared out of the ether when Bond needed him – no, when Bond *asked* for him, his word alone being enough. It was a terrible power to have.

The pair closed on the doorway of Room 325. Nothing seemed out of place. Madeleine raised her hand to knock, but 007 caught it with his own, shaking his head at her questioning look. “He’s… shy. I’ll introduce you.” Bond stepped forward, straightened his jacket, and rapped on the door.

For a long moment, 007 heard nothing. He knocked again, this time calling out “Q” in a low tone. Nothing. He felt his throat constrict. But then the regular lock clicked and the door opened a fraction, the deadbolt chain still in place, and the boffin’s face appeared on the other side. He registered the double-oh’s presence with palpable relief.

“Come in,” he unlatched the deadbolt and stepped back just enough to permit Bond. Madeleine slipped in after him, quietly amused.

“She’s with me,” Bond declared vaguely. “Dr. Madeleine Swann: Q.”

“Enchanted,” Q’s voice trickled with distaste. 007 heard him secure the door behind them before returning to his laptop.

“What do you have?”

“Drug runners, disgraced agents, extortionists, cybercriminals… all associated with this symbol,” Q pulled it up on the screen. “You can see some of them wearing rings like this one. Others use it as a watermark, or a signature. They’re an organization.”

“They’re called ‘SPECTRE,’” Madeleine finally spoke up.

“I know,” the quartermaster grumbled. “Stronger, fitter, and more fashionable,” he tilted his head at the ring, “than before.” 

“Q?”

“We might circle back to this at another time, 007. The point is that M Mansfield sent you after Mr. Sciarra because he was a member of SPECTRE. They have operatives on every continent. What we need to figure out is where the central nervous system is.”

Bond smirked. “Already figured.”

“Not quite,” Madeleine corrected him before turning her attention to Q. “But I know where to look. My father – that was his ring. Every year, he and my mother and I would vacation in Tangier, and we stayed in the same hotel, same room. I used to hear sounds coming through the walls at night. He said it was sentimental, but I think he was communicating with his… his associates,” she glanced at Bond. “I’ve given James the location, everything I know.”

“And what about you?” Q asked.

“Now I have to get her back to MI-6,” Bond answered for her, but Madeleine interjected again.

“I can take care of myself, Mr. Bond,” she smiled rosily, and Bond saw Q tense up like a cat. “I’ll have security take me to the British embassy. I am not afraid.” Dr. Swann looked between him and the quartermaster, nodding finally. “If you are really hunting down SPECTRE, I think that I am not the one who should be afraid.”

James maneuvered around Q’s chair to walk her to the lobby, but she stopped him at the door, insisting it would only be more conspicuous were she to leave in his company. “I am employed here, remember?” she gave a small, diminishing grin. He unlocked and unbolted the entrance and then stepped back, permitting Madeleine to leave, and she almost did. She paused in the doorframe, like every temporary companion on his mission thus far, and left him with a parting thought. “I am glad for you,” she whispered. “I am glad that my father didn’t die alone.”

When she had gone, he shut the door and re-locked, gathering his thoughts. Q’s exhale whistled in the background.

“I suppose we’ll have to book a flight to Tangier. I should tell you that I’m… not the fondest of flying. I think Moneypenny told you that.”

“We?” The agent turned around decisively, returning to his spot at Q’s side.

Q cocked his head at the agent. “Did you think I flew out to Austria just to force-feed you health smoothies?”

“Quartermaster, as gratifying as it is to be watched by you in person, I think I preferred the SmartBlood.”

Bond sensed immediately that he had been too flippant. Q’s quick, lively eyelashes fluttered under his fringe of ebony hair, in a motion that verged as close to rage as he had ever seen from the boffin. “I’m not watching you,” he grated superiorly. “This is my mission, more than it is yours. Who did you think informed M about SPECTRE to begin with?”

And there it was. Q’s face was wrought with dark concentration: he chewed his lip intently, eyes narrowed on the screen, fingers rattling over the keyboard like gunshots. It was humanizing to see him lose his temper, even in such a subtle way, and suddenly the quartermaster looked older and more self-possessed to Bond, more dangerous and storied, braver… and yet more fallible, more tangible. And he was captivating like this, with a meditative quality, as he huffed his quiet breaths, as he curved his long back towards the laptop, blinking furiously against an unquiet mind. But it was deeper and more difficult to express than that, what “it” was, what made the agent steady himself on the back of Q’s chair and made his head swim with exertion as he reached out a hand to the boffin’s shoulder blade, brushing tentatively. Q was exquisite. James baffled at how he had missed it before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wowza this chapter turned out longer than I expected. Sorry for the length! FYI for those who may be curious, I did consider using the part from the original script where Q gets captured, but since he's sticking with Bond from here on out I decided there was no need to throw him into mortal peril just yet :P Hope you enjoyed! And thanks to all commenters, you are giving me so much life to finish this!


	5. Chapter 5

The quartermaster shook under his thin, blue sheet, the contours of his shoulders wriggling. There were glass beads of sweat breaking on his forehead. Bond accepted a warm cloth from the flight attendant to dab at them and draped his own cotton blanket over the boffin, then turned back towards the cockpit. He had seen marks (hell, he had seen agents) afraid of flying before, but for Q it seemed to be more serious than that. The first thing he had done after passing through security was to run to a shop, wash down his most powerful sedative with Vitamin Water, and inform Bond that he would be responsible for maneuvering him onto the plane – almost two hours in advance of their flight. A second sedative, he had taken aboard, gripping the agent’s arm for reassurance.

Bond had grunted and allowed it; everything about airports seemed to unsettle that tender, trepidatious man.

Since Q was out of commission and Morocco was still a few hours away, the agent entertained himself by constructing a cover story, albeit one he and the quartermaster were unlikely to need or articulate. In what circumstance, other than the one he found them in now, would a suave talent agent and a gangly juvenile prison psychologist have to go on holiday together? They were too near in age and too visibly unrelated to pass as father and son. Adopted brothers was a possibility. They might be backpacking friends, if Q looked like the sort of person who had set foot outside even once in his life. Technically they could be a couple, but it seemed to James that they looked odd together, this burly, older man and his waifish shrink of a lover. Former schoolmates was too tenuous. 

He glanced back towards the window seat, where the boffin’s fits had subdued. And for the first time in all their months of partnership, in that rather Spartan, rather sterile aeroplane cabin, it occurred to the double-oh that he didn’t properly know what to call Q, since they were together in this. His passport read under the name Benedict Braham, which suited him about as well as lite beer suited 007. It sounded like the sort of dry, mock-serious characterization Q would choose for himself, like being a prison psychologist and growing up in Swansea. Benny might work as a nickname, or Bunny – something with two syllables had the right ring to it. He returned to dabbing Q’s brow.

 

Hotel L’Americaine stood northeast of Tangier Ibn Battouta Airport, on the coast of the Strait of Gibraltar between Route de la Plage Mercala and Bazar Mehdi Roussi. Having slept through the flight from Innsbruck and their subsequent landing, and through 007 wheeling him out of the terminal and into a musty parking garage and loading him (along with their bags) into a silver Laraki Borac, Q’s first blurry image of Morocco was the tatty white tower of the Spanish Cathedral along Avenue Belgique. He cracked his dehydrated lips and reached into his bag for water without removing his head from the cool window. Overhead there were satellite dishes perched on the flat roofs.

“Oh, good,” Bond’s voice roused him, and a large hand guided the lip of his bottle to his mouth, drizzling in the water. “I was just thinking how best to carry you into the hotel room without being… how shall I say? Conspicuous?” 

Q puffed with amusement. “007. If you so much as insinuate this to Moneypenny, the next item you receive from my department will be a gun that itches in response to your palm print.”

He smiled sideways. “By ‘your department,’ do you mean the one whose quartermaster broke C’s toys before disappearing from MI-6?”

“I was more referring to the one whose quartermaster built you an exploding watch.” Bond’s eyes widened on his wrist.

“Q? Are you joking?”

“I never joke about my work, 007… Bond, watch the road!” The car swerved.

Shortly, they passed through the bazaar and into view of Hotel L’Americaine, a white and gold French-style building with ornate, black iron fenced balconies overlooking the city and the sea. Bond left the Laraki with a concierge and offered Q his elbow, which the boffin took gratefully before ambling up the structure’s faded brick stairs. With each step, he planted his wobbling legs as steadily as he could. On top of the residual queasiness from his medication, Q felt famished, not having eaten since he and Bond took lunch in his room at the Ice Q – Bond on the couch and he in his chair in front of the laptop, sipping at a Spinach and Pomegranate Iron Booster. 

After permitting himself to be guided through the hotel’s revolving front door, the quartermaster took a seat in L’Americaine’s lobby while the double-oh firmed up their reservation. His eyes slipped shut before he hit the cushion of the chair. He was overcome by a strange sensation as the ceiling spun around his head and the hotel staff’s low ministrations prickled his ears and the clack of Bond’s shoes grew closer and closer: he felt too hot, and was beginning to sweat, in late October. His glasses had slipped down the bridge of his nose when the agent arrived at his side, leaning over him.

“Shall we, ‘Benedict’?” Q groaned in response. Without waiting for his consent, 007 pulled the quartermaster to his feet. Slumped against him wearily, Q started to make for the elevators, but the agent hooked a hand around his waist and led him instead towards the entrance, walking them together down the main steps. The boffin sent him a questioning look. “We’re going to the market. I’m starving, and you need to stay on your feet.” Already, Q could smell the cumin and olives and cinnamon from the vendor stalls, riding the same warm gust that was ruffling his travel-disheveled hair. 

The fresh air was beginning to revive him, but even so Bond’s hand remained at his hip, fingers tracing his skin in circles. Q touched his cheek unconsciously and remembered. Directly, the agent steered him into a bread souk, where they ate rghaif with goat cheese and honey, their compatible silence interspersed with a few lingering stares and uncertain smiles. They could have been any anonymous couple of tourists in Tangier. When their plate was empty, the quartermaster wondered if it wasn’t time they returned to L’Americaine to secure the room for their stake-out, but Bond only shook his head, saying that there was still one more errand to run. With a wink, he snaked an arm around the boffin and guided him back into the alley. Although the sky had grown ashy with dusk, the piles of produce and spices and the strings of light in the market stalls set upon the rogue agent and quartermaster with vibrant color: magma red, white sesame seeds, ripe limes and roses. Ahead of them in their narrow lane, Q watched a man with a white cat slung over his shoulder disappear into the crowd.

Wading through the busy current of shoppers and other wanderers, the pair broke away into a deserted, apparently residential side street, and here the double-oh stopped. They were beneath the overhang of an apartment building under construction, propped up by metal bars, with canvas crinkling in the evening breeze. The aromas and conversations of the bazaar chattered on far away from them in a harlequin glow. The quartermaster and agent stood facing each other, so near that Q could feel the warmth radiating from his body and see the resting scowl fade from his lips. It was replaced by something softer. Enclosing the younger man in his stance, Bond first took the boffin’s left hand in his left hand, and the boffin’s right hand in his right hand, calloused fingers lacing with silken ones, and then raised them together. Q’s eyelashes moved like butterflies when James kissed him.

They bought Muscat. Walking back in the direction L’Americaine, the two carried it between them, and it was as good an approximation of holding hands as their discretion would allow. As they exited the bazaar and the alleys grew darker and more secluded, James would whisk Q away into a quiet corner or a long shadow until they were both desperate for air. Each time it was harder to pull apart. When they had almost reached the plaza leading up to the front entrance, Bond held Q panting against a brick wall, flush against him, and they only separated as the sound of footsteps rang out at the other end of the thoroughfare. The quartermaster’s heart pounded – not even before, when he could barely walk, had the ascent to Hotel L’Americaine felt so tedious. He strode ahead of the agent, through the revolving door, over the black and white tiles of the lobby, past the varnished front desk, hooked into a dim hall, summoned the lift. By the time it arrived, James had caught up, and Q’s mind was beginning to race. “We should verify that the room is c—clean, and to our liking, before we settle in,” he nursed his lip, which was starting to swell. 

Bond didn’t reply but stepped into the boffin’s space, removed his glasses, and wiped them down with his pocket square. Q chuckled breathily as the agent favored him with a lopsided smirk. 

Emerging onto the seventh floor, 007 unlocked the door to their accommodations and scanned it for signs of life before admitting Q, who set about scouring for bugs. He had a program on his laptop to detect and interfere with hidden microphones, and he activated it in the center of their room, which the boffin noted with relief was relatively sparse aside from a few paintings and light fixtures. The quartermaster checked and replaced these meticulously, looking from different angles and in different gradients of light for the glint of a camera lens, and startled when he heard a series of crashes from the far end of the suite. A moment later, 007 returned producing a glass of wine. Q accepted it. 

“As long as we keep ours voices low, my program should hamper any listening devices from picking us up,” he informed the agent. “This side of the room clear.” 

“Other end had a camera built into the thermostat. Taken care of, the temperature might start to get a little uncomfortable. It’s jammed on minus 7 degrees C.”

“And the mantle clock?” Q asked, peering over Bond’s shoulder at the wreckage of springs and screws still rolling over the floor.

“Collateral.” 

“Right.” 

“Dr. Swann said she heard sounds in the early morning. We have some time to kill until then,” the agent poured himself another glass of Muscat. “So now do you want to explain to me how you knew about SPECTRE?”

“I used to work for them.”

Bond stilled, studying Q’s movements carefully. “Well, you never forget your first job.”

“It wasn’t my top choice of employment at sixteen. Our friend Mr. Silva made my acquaintance on a beach in Naples, where he drugged me and took me by plane to Shanghai. I lived there for four years,” he swirled his drink. “You can understand why I wasn’t keen to go back, delightful as Moneypenny’s description of your evening together was.”

Backtracking off the topic, Bond replaced his look of concentration with a teasing smirk. “I wonder how much Miss Moneypenny told you.”

“What, afraid she’s the sort who’d kiss and tell?”

“‘Afraid’ isn’t the word I’d use.” Q’s reaction was to blush at the agent’s cheeky grin and excessive self-confidence. “Well?”

“Well, by the sounds of it you had a lovely shave with a cutthroat razor. Must everything you do be imprudent, Bond?” 

“And?”

“And,” Q flicked his eyes up at the slowly-approaching agent, “and then you went to a casino. Dropped one of my earpieces in a glass of champagne.” Bond took Q’s drink and placed it with his own on the central table. 

“It was an honest mistake.”

“And then you fed a £200,000 micro-dermal sensor to the iguanas –”

“—they were komodo dragons –”

“—because you tripped into an environmental display. Honestly, 007.” Impatiently, Bond captured his lips and pushed him back into the bedpost, deepening the kiss until Q whimpered. 

“You know, Quartermaster,” Bond tilted further into him unsteadily, catching his breath, eyes dancing with mischief, “I feel as if I might fall again.”

For the second time, he had become Bond’s singular focus in the world. And Q felt his palms slide up James’ chest and his heels rise slightly, an obsidian curl falling out of place as their lips grazed, and then pressed. But then he pulled away. Drawing back, his eyes darted over the double-oh’s façade of unaffected machismo. “You don’t even know my name, you lout,” Q murmured and, giving it no further consideration, twisted towards the bed, which he now fully intended to occupy alone. “You’ll take first watch.” 

 

But he wonders – shrouded in the satin coverlets, cocooned in the blue of the night, eyeing the agent furtively and lulled into sleepless dreams by the wine. Q has always thought that he must care for James because life condemned them to the same brand of loneliness, the same that impels him to watch 007 reliving the loss of his parents and his love, over and over, in a parade of passionless dalliances. The same that has allowed Bond, in turn, to exploit this particular chink in his armor. It hasn’t been a week since the last time. Q knows he is right to question the agent’s motives, and his own. What vexes him now is the thought that he has already decided there is no hope, and that this will be the end of the matter – when in fact, he feels as fresh and uncertain as he did that day in the gallery. And he considers, with altogether less irony than he intends, how much could have changed in the past four days. How much more could still change in the days to come? 

“Bond,” Q’s voice crackles with exhaustion. He isn’t sure if the dozing agent hears him. “Bond,” he tries again, licking his lips, and that pair of impervious blue eyes shifts warily. Q’s stomach clenches with guilt. It occurs to him that he isn’t sure how to tell 007 what he had been thinking, nor how to explain that his rebuke was one concern rather than fear or distaste. His concern, after all, would hardly flatter the man. At last, the quartermaster sighs and says, before turning away, “I hope you don’t intend to wear that watch to bed.”

He hears James place the watch on the table and stand, blinking out sleep. The only further permission Q provides is a generous scooch to give the larger man room in the center of the bed, and the agent’s padding footsteps detour towards the nightstand (where he sets his gun) before arriving finally at Q’s side. He slips into the space where Q had been. A rush of cold air slaps them in the back, making the quartermaster tense up unconsciously. And he lets his eyes slip shut again, quite resigned to the idea that the chill will disturb him all evening, until he feels James ease against his frail form from behind, with one hand securing the blanket around Q’s waist and his other arm stretched up by his neck.

Q opens his mouth, but before he can decide whether or not to protest, James tells him he’s clearly freezing and not to overthink it. He considers retorting that Bond probably broke the thermostat on purpose to force this situation; what he says instead is that somebody has to compensate for the agent’s reckless abandon. Said agent scoffs and pulls him closer. “Well, it’s these cold, equatorial nights.” 

Bond pecks his shoulder then, and the gesture is so familiar and so casually affectionate that Q accepts it in stride. 

The quartermaster opens his hands when James reaches for them, and they must be even more frigid than he thought because Bond’s yawn catches against his neck. “Q,” he exhales, enveloping him in cardamom heat, weaving their fingers together. He relishes the boffin’s shiver on his lips like champagne. Q hears himself whisper that he’s still cold, and James traces along the tender flesh of his wrists, up behind his elbows, ruffling the sleeves at his shoulders before massaging down to his fingers again. He trembles where the older man nuzzles into his ear, breathing contentedly, pressing his mouth into his rumpled raven hair. “Is that better?” Q bites his lip, managing a small nod.

Nothing more is said. A soft light trickles in through the window – whether it comes from the sun’s heralding rays or a blood moon or the streets, it speckles the cream-colored sheets that are draped around the boffin and the agent with bronze. Like this, sleep washes over them. And for the first time since his recruitment at MI-6, indeed for the first time since Raoul Silva kidnapped him so many years before, Q falls asleep thinking that he would prefer to stay awake and listen to James’ heartbeat echoing into him. Reluctantly he lets it go: the gentle scratch of Bond’s morning stubble; his quiet breathing; the orange lights and the satin; this cozy, perfect aegis in James’ arms. Even the tick of the watch falls silent. 

 

007 opens his eyes sometime in the night to find that his face is still nestled in the younger man’s wild locks. The quartermaster is salt and lemon, saffron, Muscat, roses from the market; he smells complex and cheerful. Four days ago – or was it now five? – Q was one of the ghosts in his life, and now he is in grave danger of becoming important to Bond. Perhaps it has already happened, while he was unconscious. 

Shaking his head groggily, the man settles back into the crook of Q’s neck. Madeleine hadn’t been specific about the sort of noise he was meant to listen for, only that it comes somewhere from the room’s exterior at dawn; thus far, James has heard nothing louder than the street’s ambiance and the sound of Q sighing in his sleep. It’s too serene, and 007 grows suspicious of the peace. Forcing himself to take inventory of their surroundings, he raises his head into the cool air, where he catches the slightest movement in the corner of his eye. His hand unthreads from the quartermaster’s and reaches for his knife. 

Another shadow flickers across the floor, and 007 jolts to cover Q with his arm, releasing the knife in the direction of their attacker. It thuds impotently into the wall. Waking from the ruckus, the quartermaster starts for his own blade but then halts mid-motion. Bond stops as well, squinting at the spot where his opponent had been. The shadow in question stirs hesitantly. After a long pause, Q, still circled in James’ protective arm, flops back into the mattress, shaking with helpless laughter as a pink, whiskered nose cuts through the darkness. Bond shifts until he’s half-seated in the bed, steadying himself on Q’s hip. He glares down the mouse with all the seriousness he can muster. “Who sent you?” The rodent cocks its head, and he reaches towards the nightstand for his gun.

“For heaven’s sake, 007!” the quartermaster twitters with surprise, scooping the Walther PPK out of his hand and depositing it by the lamp. “Don’t tell me this is your standard procedure for dealing with pests.”

“Now one of us has to get out of bed to go deal with it,” Bond gripes. “Actually, try throwing your glasses at it.” The boffin shoots him a disgusted look, and he frowns with resignation. “Shame you didn’t bring that giant cat of yours along.”

“Partridge is a ragdoll, James.”

“I’ve seen smaller mountains, Q.” Q tuts and brushes the hair out of his eyes, reaching for his spectacles.

“Anyway, I suppose I’d better drive it off.”

“No,” James kisses his head, rolling out from under the sheets and smoothing them back over the younger man. “Don’t move.”

The mouse scuttles away at the sound of the floor creaking under Bond’s foot, but the agent is more interested in his knife, which pierced the wall down to its hilt. He examines it for a moment, and he hears Q rustle behind him, stripping the bed and wrapping himself in the blanket before joining 007 at the strangely hollow wall. “Dr. Swann wasn’t hearing noises from the other tenants, was she?”

James tears the blade from the plaster and plywood and thrusts it again into a different spot, with the same results. “Hand me the watch,” he commands. Q recedes to the bed momentarily and then swishes back, depositing a small hammer in the double-oh’s grip. Bond scowls at it.

They make short, loud work of the wall, which 007 notices the staff of L’Americaine is conveniently ignoring and will surely patch up again once they’re away. Perhaps they’ve been paid off to accommodate a certain amount of destruction when a foreigner checks into Room 707. Once the gape in the wall is large enough to step through, the agent stalks inside, gun drawn, with the boffin following him closely. The interior is grey stone and concrete. In the center, there is a fold-out table containing an old desktop computer, a small television, and a VCR. A cork board of family photos hangs in the back corner beside a shelf of record files and tapes.

Splitting from his quartermaster to appraise the photos, the gravity of Q’s earlier confession suddenly strikes him. “Q?”

“007?”

“Silva used an advanced memory-wipe on his computer, didn’t he?”

“A fail-safe that deletes certain files when you try to access them – ”

“Which you invented.” Bond zeros in on a picture of Mr. White, his wife, and Madeleine, swinging from the bough of a beech tree.

“For SPECTRE. Or rather its decade-old predecessor, before developing the idea for MI-6. I’m sorry to say they had leverage.” 

“They had your parents.” Q goes quiet, and Bond turns back to see him nodding thoughtfully.

“In a sense. My parents were with them first. Their miscalculation was in trying to keep Tetricus from involving me.” 

007 blinks. “They were working for SPECTRE.”

“Yes.”

Bond paces to the shelf and scans the video labels. Most of the names and designations are unfamiliar to him. “What happened?”

“Tetricus saw it as the future of espionage. The technological trend: cyberwarfare, hacking, tracking, CCTV. I was a possible asset…” Bond’s eyes freeze on one of the tapes. “So my parents resigned – or so they told me. We fled to Paris, Gothenburg, Amsterdam, finally Italy. Tetricus sent Silva. Probably thought I’d respond better to somebody I could talk to about data encryption and polymorphic virus constructs. But Silva anticipated that I wouldn’t.

“He sedated them and kidnapped me. And for four years that was enough to keep us all obedient, knowing that the other was alive. I suppose my parents decided they couldn’t live with that arrangement anymore.”

“They came after you?”

“They tried,” Q huffs placidly, his shoulders falling. “In the end, it was MI-6 that reached me. SPECTRE had my mother and father killed.”

“Like her,” 007 mutters. The tape in his hand would need to be rewound to be watched, and likely cleaned, its black letters already fading to grey: ‘INTERROGATION: VESPER LYND.’

“Like her,” Q repeats. Bond leaves it on the shelf.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oof, finally some romantic stuff! Thanks to everybody who's reading and leaving such lovely and thoughtful comments -- it makes my day! I hope you enjoyed this chapter, and I'll try to keep them coming at a reasonable pace :)


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please be advised, this chapter contains a TRIGGER WARNING for sexual abuse. It doesn't last too long, but for those who may be upset, please skip the first section of this chapter. See my end notes for further explanation.

“Darling, Darling, it’s time to smile for the camera.”

The boy’s vision fuzzed with slick, polished grey. Waking up, in this instance, made him aware of several minor traumas he had sustained in the course of his stupor. His neck, bent backwards and exposed, had gone completely stiff; his shoulders were hunched painfully. His fingers, when he tried to open them, were dug so deep in his palms that they broke skin, and they were numb with lost circulation. The stale, tangy reek of ammonia flooded his nostrils. 

A lamp flashed – he didn’t know from where. His retinae sizzled under his eyelids as the grisly voice continued to click its tongue languorously, tutting: “No, no, no, no. I need your focus now, cygnet. We’re saying ‘hello’ to Mommy and Daddy.” The boy choked with a sudden recollection: the beach in Naples, the bleach-blonde Spaniard, his parents sprawled over the green chairs. Something cool and sharp dug below his eyes, sending them open again. But Q could see nothing distinct, nothing save a warped tin stream that bulged on either side the man’s fleshy bulb of a head. So Raoul leaned in and bit down on the boffin’s lip until it broke with red.

“Now he’s smiling.” Q felt the blood trickle down his chin in streaks. He had begun to shiver. It seemed to him – if he could hazard a guess – that they were in an enclosure of some kind, perhaps an interrogation chamber or a bunker. The grind of the electrical generator was deafening. As Raoul positioned his head between his thumb and forefinger, the boy recognized slowly that he couldn’t move himself. His limbs were as heavy as anvils. Even to swallow and blink required too much effort. 

His throat squeezed, his stomach churned with nausea, and he fell forward, unseeing but still damnably lucid. Apparently satisfied with this result, the Spaniard switched off his video recorder. Stowing it in his bag, he inched forward again, sliding his hands along the boffin’s hips. “No reason to be hasty, cygnet. We have all the time in the world. Or at least, we have all day, before the Chinese take you away from me,” he pouted, forcing his way between Q’s legs. “They must take you off my hands, take away the temptation… You are too clever to refuse me when I ask you something, hmm? Methaqualone… mmm… only makes choosing easier.” A large finger stroked under Q’s jaw, agitating his salivary glands. 

Silva rocked underneath him, a slow smile growing on his face, raking his hands up Q’s thighs. Internally, the adolescent revolted at it; his lips parted slightly and soundlessly. Q’s eyelids wouldn’t budge. He heard the tear of his zipper. Raoul’s nails dug into his bare abdomen and curled around to his posterior, forcing his hips forward and back. His jeans slackened uselessly to his ankles. Raoul hissed with delight. “You must be thinking that you know what is about to happen,” he sang, prizing open Q’s collar. “But you know nothing. And the Boss – mine, and yours – he knows, mmm, everything.” His hands groped down, wrenching a wounded exhale out of the boy.

“Do you understand how it is possible for him to know everything?” Raoul teased, gripping harder. “It is because he controls everything. Weddings and funerals. Business empires and assassinations. Even the most… intimate affairs, between lovers,” he brushed the boy’s sore lip with his teeth. “And the Boss wants his men – how you say? – unspoiled. I argue that you are not a man yet, hmm? But he won’t listen,” and with this, Silva gave a final, cruel clench and released him. “A waste.” 

The Spaniard hauled Q back into his metal chair, pulling up and re-zipping his trousers. He wiped Q’s mouth with paper towels. The boffin felt tears welling under his eyelashes, and with one last burst of effort he managed to slit them apart, allowing the moisture to spill down his cheeks. Raoul promptly whisked it away. In spite of his terror, or perhaps because he couldn’t stem it, because he couldn’t slow his mind from seizing onto the hope of escape, Q determined to figure out where they were hidden, any clues he could glean: the bunker was tight, by his estimation; it contained one stool or chair on which he was sat, but no table; the floor was as grey and glossy as the walls. In his present condition, and bad as his vision already was without his glasses, he couldn’t discern any of the studio’s finer features. There was the overhead lamp and the chime and buzz of a computer not far off, and a door straight in front of him, which Raoul slid open, and which in that instant blinded him with light.

Directly, Q was shuffled out of the tin room and into the bright, fully-occupied cabin of an aeroplane. Situated beside the lavatory door, a disgruntled middle-aged man tapped his toe and removed one of his earplugs, as if to demand an explanation from the Spaniard. Raoul only shrugged. ‘Flight sickness,’ he mouthed, pointing to the boy before stumbling with his charge down the aisle. One or two older women, sitting near the facilities, looked on Q sympathetically. A stewardess offered him a napkin, which Raoul accepted with a wink. Soon, the man had deposited him in his seat by the window, where the boffin was compelled to gape out at an empty sky while the passengers of Flight 1023 to Shanghai slept, played solitaire, drank, kicked each others' seats, shushed their children, and failed utterly to notice him. And it transpired that for the next half hour until Silva re-administered his Quaaludes, Q was as perfectly aware of his surroundings as he was perfectly incapable of engaging them. 

 

Bond reclines in his seat across from the quartermaster, vistas of the Atlantic coast whirring past him. They are on the train to Erfoud, in a private booth furnished with warm olivewood benches, a bunk bed, and heavy maroon cushions, racing south along the beaches peripheral to Tangier; once on the border, a smaller railway will carry them into the station nearest the coordinates from Mr. White’s files, thick in the Algerian desert southeast of Oum El Assel. “So Q,” the boffin looks up from his laptop, widening his eyes. James is studying him with the faintest hint of distraction. “With all due respect to you parents’ good taste, they didn’t name you Benedict, did they?”

“Why ever not?” the younger man glances back to his screen impassively. “It’s a Catholic name.”

“But it isn’t your name.” Q chews his lip, but he doesn’t get the chance to parry James’s line of questioning any further. 

“I’m sure this isn’t the time or place to discuss it, 007. I – I have something to show you, in any case,” he turns his computer towards the agent. “Look here.” Bond leans forward, switching in an instant to deadly concentration. “Algerian DRS has drones monitoring the area. I’ve succeeded in accessing their image bank, and…” he zooms in, “I don’t think this is another one of Mr. White’s safe houses we’re dealing with.”

Bond’s eyes quicken, scanning the topography. “It’s not,” he affirms. “It’s a base.”

“The central nervous system. We may have to adjust our tactics.”

The double-oh looks perturbed. “You think?”

“They’re sure to know we’re coming for them,” Q muses, “so your standard parody of an infiltration would be ineffectual. Guns blazing and all. I would normally recommend discretion, perhaps a service hatch or a back door. But if Tetricus sends his men to pick us up at the station, we may be forced to use their security clearance to get in; if not, I’ll see what I can do on my laptop. Of course, they’ll know to expect a cyberattack from our end…”

“Only if they know you’re with me,” 007 interjects, and Q blinks vigorously.

“Which they do. I was intercepted by two men in Austria. Former associates of mine...” Bond’s lips twitch almost imperceptibly before he disguises it with a smirk, crossing his arms. “They brought sedatives, presumably to haul me back to headquarters without my making a fuss.” 

“Oh, I can’t imagine they’ve reported back.” Answering Q’s stare, he adds, “A broken neck will slow most people down. They came after Madeleine next. She didn’t take kindly to it.”

“Immaterial,” the quartermaster declares uneasily. 007 is still observing him, face plastered with an inscrutable smile. “They knew to anticipate me at the Ice Q, and they know that we stayed the night in Tangier.”

“Under my name. I destroyed the camera in our room.”

“Which will be a great comfort to me when SPECTRE verifies my identity in the hotel’s security footage,” Q sighs. “Still, it’s possible that they’ll believe I’ve been called back to London from my leave of absence. If I create a false trail leading back to MI-6, it might convince them that we parted ways in Tangier. Throw them into enough doubt to draw some fire away from us. Let’s assume they are aware of our activities, and you’ll keep them occupied while I neutralize their security. I’ll see if there isn’t a better lay of the land. And let me get this trail started...”

Bond resumes looking out the side window, thumbing his Walther PPK, and Q goes about leaving breadcrumbs for SPECTRE: a flight reservation to Heathrow, records of transaction for brunch and tea near Ibn Battouta, attempts to access the internet in the terminal, a message to Moneypenny asking after the cats… Deep down, Q expects, James knows as well as he does that this is an exercise in futility, a diversion more for their own nervous energy than for SPECTRE’s attention. He supposes that this is why the agent has hardly spoken all morning: he and Bond are running down the barrel of a gun together, after all, with no possible trick or turn that Tetricus will not outmaneuver.

After several minutes, the quartermaster shuts his laptop, gazing out over the rusty shores and pastel harbors of Moulay Bousselham. All along the coast, rowboats in orange, blue, and white cling to the sandbars like footprints smattering a beach. There are albatrosses curving on the wind. It occurs to him then, as it had in the bazaar, that in another circumstance he might simply be happy to be – here, in this attractive little room, with a man he rather fancies, watching the sunlight shattering over the surface of the water. Q allows himself a glimmer of self-satisfaction in remembering the previous night. For better or worse, he has chosen James – the man and his mission – and he intends to see it through. 

Noticing the younger man’s smug expression, Bond breaks their silence again. “While we’re on the topic of your former associates, Q,” he says this last letter carefully, “why don’t you tell me why they left you alone for thirteen years in the British secret service?” The boffin raises an eyebrow. 

“I always assumed they were averse to me flaunting their dress code.”

“That’s not an answer.” The train jolts on a bump.

“If it’s all the same to you, 007, I prefer n–”

“‘Not to discuss it.’ And what if it was important for me to know?”

“Why?” Bond slams the table with his fist, knocking their miniature lamp onto the floor, where it rolls off in the direction of the door. Q gulps, squeezing his eyes shut, briefly unable to collect himself.

“Why didn’t they come for you?” Bond resumes with chilly disinterest. Q can’t bring himself to look up. When he doesn’t respond, the agent presses him again: “If you’re really here to help me take down SPECTRE, you’ll tell me why Silva didn’t try to kill you when he had the chance.”

“He did,” Q breathes shakily. “Remember? The explosion at MI-6 originated in Q Branch.”

“Killing Boothroyd. And making you his replacement...” Upon reflection, Q considers, he really should have anticipated that James would find his story suspicious, somewhere down the line – not only on account of its improbability, not just by his reluctance to divulge it, but by sheer virtue of how many times the grizzled agent has been betrayed in the past – and yet he hadn’t anticipated it, and in the double-oh’s cool regard he finds himself caught utterly off guard. 007 raps the table dangerously, his face twisting into a snarl. “M never lived to find out who planted the bomb, did she?”

“James –” Q feels sick, shell-shocked, feels he should bolt from the room. 

“I’m sure C’s project was a convenient development, if you didn’t recommend it yourself – a way to track every operative in the service indefinitely,” Bond glares him down. “Even took the opportunity to destroy MI-6’s tracking software to gain my trust. But SPECTRE has a copy, don’t they?” Q tries again to protest, but 007 stands, growling over him. “So their assassins follow me everywhere I go, until the moment you show up. And you happen to ‘discover’ that we’re en route to their base of operations.”

“Think about it! Why would I tell you at all if I intended to deceive you?” his voice raises over the agent’s.

“So I wouldn’t kill you when we arrive.” 

Q’s reply dies on his lips. 007 is scrutinizing him, face sunken, unshaved as the day they first met, teeth gritted furiously. James Bond thinks him a traitor, personally responsible for the death of M. 

Trembling with adrenaline, and with great care to broadcast his movement, Q removes his glasses, pushing them across the table towards Bond. He is plunged immediately into the atmosphere of the room where Silva abused him: vague and frightening, shady and uncertain. James could pull a gun on him now and he wouldn’t see it – then again, he wouldn’t want to. After a considered pause, taking his right sleeve in his left hand, he pulls an arm out of his red argyle cardigan, and then wriggles his other arm out, lifting the shirt over his head until it comes loose. This, he folds sightlessly and slides towards Bond. He undoes his tie, a deep, bold blue that he has worn often before, slips it around his neck, rolls it, and balances it on the cardigan. His sleeves he unbuttons, and next his front, offering up his lavender shirt. From here, he supplements the small pile with his standard-issue knife, which he drops from open palms; his Scrabble wallet; his mother’s engagement ring; his travel packets of earl grey; and, his watch, a far simpler affair than Bond’s Omega: all this he gives to the quietly bewildered agent and then rests his hands on the table top. His lip is quivering. He sits alone before James in only his trousers and undershirt, holding his eyelids open vacantly.

“Cygnus,” he says at last. “That’s what Raoul called me, when I joined SPECTRE. His ‘little cygnet.’ He left me with the operatives in Shanghai, but you know that. When my parents… when MI-6 reached my location, the man in whose house I was staying blindfolded me, led me to the bank of the Huangpu River, and fired.” Q touches the scar above his left breast. “After executing him, 0011 fished me out of the water and helicoptered us out. MI-6 leaked information that I had died on the flight back London. 

“When I was in custody, M and Tanner questioned me for all I could tell them about SPECTRE. All their resources, all their connections in East Asia, their business dealings, operatives, leadership. Everything I knew. And then I begged M to keep me on as a technician, after I had outstayed my utility as an informant. She agreed, on the condition that I remain under surveillance and submit to routine psych evals. It was several years before Tetricus was any the wiser that I was alive, and by then M had weakened his organization too much for him to come after MI-6 directly. None of us was expecting to see Silva again, when he resurfaced last year. I suppose Tetricus’ priorities changed, and he decided that M was his most immediate threat. Sent along a man who wanted revenge on her even more than he wanted it on me. Silva probably rigged that bomb to spare my life on purpose, so he could manipulate me into leading him to M.

“Bond. James,” he shakes his head. “If you don’t believe anything I’ve said, trust in one thing for me, please. Take my effects. Take my computer. Take possession of my flat, and Partridge and Turing. Ask me for my name again, and I will tell you. Demand anything. I have… I have nothing left, that I would not give you.”

For a long time, the only sound is that of the rattling passenger cars, parting with the Atlantic and rumbling southeast into the Forêt de la Maâmora. When Bond finally exhales, Q hears him pace around to his side of the bench, where he sits at a safe distance. Two large palms press against the boffin, one on each shoulder, positioning his torso to face the agent. And then James rustles through the items on the table, restoring each one to its place as slowly as the quartermaster had removed them: he tucks the knife back into Q’s leg holster; slips the wallet and ring securely into his pockets; fits his watch around his left wrist gently; buttons up his lavender shirt; ties his bold, blue tie; pulls the red cardigan down over his head; and, slides the quartermaster’s glasses back onto his nose. Bond leaves his hands on the younger man’s shoulders. Q doesn’t open his eyes.

“I’m not Vesper,” he whispers. James can only nod.

 

By the time their train stops in Khemisset, the agent and quartermaster have fallen asleep in the shadow of the Atlas Mountains. Bond has a nightmare – not an unfamiliar occurrence, but not in the character of any he has had before: he pushes through the heavy, ancient doors of Skyfall, flames licking around their edges. When he enters the front room, it looks dissimilar to his memories, but not in any way he could describe: there is no color, no furniture, nothing spatial whatever. It is only when he makes a wrong step in this dark, dismal interior and hears a startled yelp, a cat scurrying from under his foot, that he reasons out that it must be Q’s home. He calls for the boffin, with no answer. Drawing his gun, he moves towards the kitchen, which is overflowing with water. The tap is running, held in place by none other than Lucia Sciarra, who nods to the agent as he steps into the flooded room. “He was upstairs,” she frowns. 

“Was?” he edges forward.

“Perhaps you should have told him a secret of your own. He was upstairs.”

“Where is he now?” 007 asks unsteadily. Donna Sciarra gestures up, and James looks at the ceiling just in time to see the first droplets of a growing bloodstain shower to the ground. 

When Bond awakens again, the sunset has smeared the rolling green and the spires of rocks around Azrou with incarnadine. He runs a hand over his mouth and the stubble on his chin and checks his watch: 5:35 PM. Q is still slumped by his side, breath whistling softly. Resisting the instinct to smooth his fingers through the boffin’s stubbornly matted curls, 007 stretches and makes for the lavatories with his razor and cream. 

When he later returns with plates from the dining car in hand, Q’s nymph-like features, sallow and exhausted, are animated again: he looks up at the agent with a moment’s surprise, as if the latter had risen through the floor and not merely entered from the corridor of a passenger car. His spectacles hang askew on his face; he had forgotten to take them off. “I brought food,” Bond shuts the door with his foot and roll-steps toward the table, trying not to spill. He sets a large bowl and a glass in front of the bemused young man and then moves to the other side, leaving his dinner there – but before he can sit, 007 hears the boffin call his name and sees him shift down the bench. So he retraces his steps.

“What are we eating?”

James hands Q a spoon. “Yours is lentil soup and mint tea. Mine’s lamb stew.”

“What’s it called?”

“Tajine.”

“Tajine,” Q enunciates and tests his own meal approvingly. “It’s... lovely. Thank you for the soup.”

Bond draws his eyebrows together. “Don’t mention it.” 

They tuck into their respective dishes in a tentatively domestic fashion: Bond with a staid hand despite his naturally robust posture, Q blowing carefully on each spoonful of lentils and strumming his knee awkwardly. Neither has the remotest idea of what to say. Despite Q's apparent calm, 007 is certain that he has hurt the other man terribly – he is also certain that said man understands, perhaps better than he does himself. Introspection is a hobby that he typically indulges with drunkenness, and with Q he has been uncharacteristically sober. Bond puts down his utensils and turns to face the boffin, who returns his look.

“You were right, earlier. I was remembering Miss Lynd,” he starts, unaccustomed to saying her name aloud. “I was remembering that she liked to watch me sleep. When I’d wake up, she’d be sitting over me… This morning, in bed, I hoped that it was you hogging all the blankets. I spared a thought that last night was a dream, and it wasn’t your ice cold feet jabbing into my leg that woke me up. But I checked, and there you were.” Bond reaches out attentively, intending to brush Q's cheek, but thinks better of it. Leaning forward instead, he places the boffin’s hand on his chest and watches his mask of placidity fracture, murmuring on: “I believe you. And as invigorating as it was to watch you strip off your clothes piece by piece, I think you’ve got the wrong idea about which parts of you I like.”

“And here I thought you were just partial to argyle.”

Q spreads his fingers, and for a minute James fancies that he can even feel the younger man’s pulse tapping like wings against his breast. 

 

Pulling his black collar to his chin and dipping his beret, the man kicks another moon-tinged stone into the wide wooden slats. His train is running behind. The desert which permeates Erfoud – hostile with fleas, sweat, and the blistering skin of rotted shrews by day – is by night even more unbearably frigid than he had recalled, and it makes his nose throb. The express rail from Tangier has pulled in on the parallel track, producing a small but auspicious crowd of businessmen, tourists, and manual laborers, who are unloading the luggage and crates to go to Algeria. Amidst the offended hisses of the passengers, taken aback by the temperature, and the silver flurries of sand, and the tell-tale blare approaching from the west, two characters in particular catch his attention.

One of them, a slender, dark figure in an oversized leather jacket, slings a messenger bag across his shoulder and saunters in the direction of the station. His movements are slightly stilted, and he turns corners a little too sharply but not without grace. Poking out under the hem of his coat is a ruby-red jumper. In profile, the man looks remarkably young, almost juvenile, with acute, elfin attributes. His companion, whose back is turned away, is more rugged, sturdier. His stride makes his muscles prominent but not prone; his ashy blonde hair is clean-cut. It is with wry satisfaction that their observer watches this odd couple, dodging the external lights, race through the station and around to his side of the tracks. They stop several car-widths down the line from him, but then, it wouldn’t matter in the slightest if they were miles away, or if the three of them were caught in the largest of crowds: Leon Hinx never forgets a mark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so I deliberated over writing the section with Silva, but I thought one of the compelling things about him in Skyfall was his use of sexual intimidation on Bond. It seemed in-character that he would try to demoralize Q using similar methods, and it also seemed to me that this might be a root of Q's fear of airplanes (among other ways it has influenced him). It has been my aim to write Q as a character who is a survivor of sexual abuse and has been shaped by his experience of it, not merely to use this as a plot device; I hope that I am able to do this goal justice. I apologize in advance for any distress to readers.
> 
> All that being said, thank you for reading this chapter! I know it was pretty heavy!


	7. Chapter 7

As James thinks on it now, glancing from his watch to the gold-threaded seats, from the polite attention of other passengers to his clasped hands, this was the first time he had known Q to discuss his past without reverting to wry deflections. It had come unanticipated on the night prior, after their row, when the agent had settled his silver silhouette against their booth’s dark window. Q lay awake on the narrow mattress with his arms crossed over his chest. His breathing was slow and apprehensive. The boffin was ensconced in 007’s shadow, eyes wide and glittering faintly as they bore through the rafters when he started to speak, and at length he described his relationship with Raoul Silva. 

What had gone implied about Cygnus’ recruitment dawned on James in a deluge of horrid impressions: the way Silva’s suit jacket caught the Neapolitan breeze, the sterile smell of the plane lavatory, Q’s paralysis, the taste of blood running in the grooves of his teeth, the bruises on his abdomen. The naïve joy he had had in his station, studying to become a textiles engineer, cartwheeling up and down a white shore, while all the time Silva watched him from the peripheries. Cygnus had been made to feel weak and susceptible and ashamed; he had been whipped and shot at, deprived of sleep, forced to grovel for food, indoctrinated, and harassed. At once, 007 began to comprehend the lost soul who had emerged from the Huangpu, translucent and sputtering, and at once he felt his stomach writhe with guilt renewed.

When they were at MI-6, and all he could see in his quartermaster’s stolen looks was the same misguided affection that he had seen innumerably before – in Moneypenny, and Madeleine, and Strawberry Fields – there had been nothing to doubt. When he awoke in Morocco, thoroughly bewildered by the innocence of their evening together, and he found Q watching him with his patient, painful sincerity, James had mistrusted it on principle.

The agent is being observed by a small crowd of travelers, whom he acknowledges summarily. At the edge of their bench, an auburn woman with sharp, pixie features is trying to catch his attention. Q is running late. 

In the morning, he startled to the sound of the boffin clacking busily on his keyboard, gulping earl grey from a Styrofoam cup. There was a plate of breakfast next to 007 on the table. “It’s the least I could do, after last night,” Q said without looking up.

“Have a drink with me later and we’ll call it even.”

“Look here, we have a message from Moneypenny.” So it read:

Q:  
The cats are furious and so am I. You’re not really coming home; where are you? C is calling for your arrest, and M is only slightly less miffed.   
Tanner is worried sick. He won’t stop straightening his office.

If you’re really going after SPECTRE, I’m not sure if I should be relieved or horrified that James is with you.   
C has suspended me from MI-6 indefinitely, but if I can be of any help… Please be careful, you two. I need you to come back safe. 

Also, tell James that if he doesn’t look you in the eye like a gentleman, I’ll have his head. 

Love,  
Eve

Q sighed. “So much for persuading Tetricus that we parted ways in Tangier.”

6:04 PM. At 5, James had closed Q’s laptop and informed him that it was time to get drunk; massaging his temples, the quartermaster called Bond a barbarian and told him that he would be ready in an hour sharp. So 007 had strolled the length of the train, ignoring his onlookers and feeling uncharacteristically nervous. 

Q is on his mind no less in his absence than in his presence, and increasingly Bond’s memory of the preceding ten months of their friendship feels like a catalogue of promises: a cheeky flirt to preempt infatuation, a loss of trust flowing towards the inevitable reconciliation, a kiss that has kindled something more. James finds, as he strums his fingers over the vacant table, that he can still picture his friend beavering away, cross-legged on the bed in a florid green jumper, chattering intermittently about his cats and the weather in London. His hair is unkempt, and his eyes, bruised with exhaustion and verging on bloodshot. It’s a sight less glamorous than the brunette, fishing through her black purse for lipstick and teasing him with glances, and yet Bond scarcely notices her. His watch reads 6:07 PM. 

From head to toe, the boffin is dressed almost exclusively in variations of blue: a cobalt and navy plaid jacket, a midnight silk vest, azure wrists, grey trousers with a tinge of teal. His shirt is lilac. His shoes, like his glasses frames and the buttons on his jacket, are black. When James looks up again, Q is standing in the entrance thus, fidgeting with his collar, beaming at him – not his wide, chaste grin as so often before; not his nervous quirk; but an open, sultry, genuine smile. He could have been looking into the firmament and seen less light. Even situated on opposite ends of the dining car, Bond reckons he can feel Q as near as if they two were entwined. When neither man breaks his gaze, Q sidesteps the car’s other occupants, suppressing a snicker. 

“You’re gawking,” Q chides, pecking Bond on the cheek.

“You’re making me.” When he pulls back to take his seat, every nerve in 007’s body protests.

“Blue agrees with me, then?”

“Mmm, now that I think about it,” James offers a lopsided grin. “I may have been distracted.”

“Likewise.” His eyes are glimmering.

The boffin’s presence is quickly acknowledged by a waiter, and he orders for them before Bond can speak. “Two martinis, please. No olive in mine – in either. Dirty,” he elaborates, looking on 007’s smugness with reproach. “Non-alcoholic for him.”

“You can overlook that last part,” James slips the server a tip.

Two tables down, the young woman straightens her dress auspiciously, giggling with the rest of her cohort. Sweeping down the passageway in a column, she steals a snide look at Q, to which the quartermaster taps his toe. He allows them to shuffle out of earshot.

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” Q starts, “although it seems I’ve done your popularity with the snob and cocktails crowd a bit of damage. I don’t know how you put up with high society, 007.”

He raises an eyebrow but makes no reply. The agent knows – and to a point, purposefully maintains – his reputation as the sort who prefers to keep a gaggle of blushing sophisticates hanging off his arm, but it had somehow eluded him before that he might be embarrassed to be seen with another man. And of all possible men! the driest-witted, most stubborn, most reprehensibly-dressed boffin imaginable: in his youth, James thinks, he would have scoffed at the quartermaster’s self-possessed idiosyncrasies. Aged forty-five, he finds them exhilarating. 

“Of course, I don’t know how you put up with most of it,” his companion continues. “Always under fire, always on the run. The small talk and the sycophants. Wearing solid colors. Not enough art museums in this plan,” Q smiles, and Bond reciprocates. “You’re, um… w—we have our drinks.”

“Well, then let me propose a toast,” James takes his glass, holding it up to the boffin’s. “To grand old warships.”

“To grand old warships.”

As the quartermaster draws a sip, his jaw tightens almost imperceptibly, which Bond registers with amusement: it’s clear that Q isn’t at all partial to martinis, dirty or otherwise. James supposes that after he drank Q’s proffered health shake in Sölden, the quartermaster was keen to return the favor, and it’s terribly endearing. Putting down his beverage, Q adds, “It occurs to me that I never properly thanked you for the champagne.”

“You enjoyed it?”

“Mmm. I thought it would take the edge off my stack of intra-departmental investigations and inventory reviews from C, but it might have done a little too well. In the end they all went unread. Still sitting on my counter, I’d expect.” 

“C does get touchy about lost property.” 

“Stolen property. Bond, whatever do you suppose you’d do with your time, if it wasn’t spent generally mistreating my equipment?”

“What am I doing now?” James grins. Q’s lips part meekly.

“R—right.”

Shaking his head, Bond summons the waiter and orders a bottle of Moët & Chandon, earning a quietly relieved chuckle from the quartermaster. As the waiter pours, Q inquires what they ought to toast next. 

“To Mallory’s good humour?”

“Don’t know if there’s enough of it left,” says the boffin. “To lost property?”

They clink glasses.

Lowering his drink, Bond breathes uneasily. “Q, when you said that you’d share anything with me...”

The quartermaster blinks, watching him earnestly.

“Put me out of my misery, will you,” he fingers along the stem of his flute, capturing the boffin’s stare with a look of anticipation. “Tell me your real name. And if it starts with the letter ‘Q,’ I swear –”

“Quirόs,” Q bites his lip mischievously, “is my surname. My paternal grandfather was Mexican. Spied for Britain during the Second World War. My name is Brandy Alexander Quirόs.” 

“You’re called Brandy Alexander?” the double-oh stills his hand and leans forward on his elbows, unsure of whether to laugh or groan. “You must be joking.”

“Why? Don’t you like it on me?” Q pries with characteristically calm indignation.

“Very much. Your parents had good taste...” Through the tableside window, the last currant streams of sunlight are ebbing back across the sand. Morocco was columns and sparse trees among golden dunes; in Algeria, these are superseded by cliffs of dark stone, jutting through vast, veined, rusty horizons. Their train seems very small by contrast. “Tell me something, Brandy,” James stresses his name with satisfaction. “What will you do once this is over? You’ve told me why you stayed with MI-6, but what about now?”

“What, you mean after I’ve sassed SPECTRE into submission?” he tapers off thoughtfully. “I suppose I might need a new hobby. I hear that lethal menswear passes the time.”

“I was going to recommend scrapbooking.”

“You were going to suggest that I leave,” Q flits his gaze down and up. “You’re… you’re not still… uncertain, are you? About me?”

Bond takes his hand instinctively, giving it a reassuring squeeze. “The thought never crossed my mind.”

“And so?”

“And so, I’ve never heard you talk before about what you want.”

“I could say the same.” The boffin isn’t accusing him; his hazel eyes are soft and insinuating. “There’s no guarantee that M will welcome me back. Or C, if his merger succeeds. You, they’d be mad not to reinstate, but they’ll have found by now that R would make a more-than-competent quartermaster. Perhaps I really ought to start looking elsewhere. Contingency plan.”

“I like you looking at me just fine.”

As James raises his glass again to his lips, the younger man is studying him queerly. “Bond?”

“Yes, Q?”

“Do you normally drink so fast when you’re about to go to bed with someone?” 007 chokes on his sip.

When he finally recovers, and in so doing, James catches sight of a looming figure reflected in Q’s glasses. 

 

007 stands and draws his gun in one motion, but Mr. Hinx has the advantage. The agent’s body smashes through the table, sending up a cascade of broken wood and glass, and his vision flickers out. With his first target dazed, Leon faces Cygnus – Silva’s little traitor, frailer in the flesh than he had imagined – as Q’s knife grazes his left shoulder. It cuts where his head had been a moment before. Leon lunges into the man with the full force of his weight, crushing him into the back wall and pinning his hand; Cygnus knees him in the groin. He drops the knife before Leon can reach it, kicking it down the hall into the cargo bay. In retaliation, Hinx slams his head against the doorframe until his hair is matted with blood.

Bond is rising from the rubble behind him, and this is unquestionably the same man he had trailed in Rome, with the same polar rage in his stare. This is the error for which he had been punished. Leon turns on James venomously, wiping the spot on his face where his nose had been. Before the agent can retrieve his Walther PPK, Leon cups his chin, digging a massive thumb into his jaw, preparing to rip it off. Thinking quickly, 007 hooks his leg around Hinx’s and topples the minotaur to the ground. He aims his heel at Leon’s exposed pelvis.

The larger man grips Bond’s ankle and twists hard, throwing his balance. An untimely jolt of the train sprawls 007 into the wreckage of the table, where Leon surges above him, wrapping his stubby, gargantuan fingers around Bond’s throat. The double-oh presses his thumbs into Hinx’s eyes, who yells, lowering his head as he squeezes tighter and tighter, and 007 rasps for air. The agent claws at his hands frantically, his breaths getting shallower. Enjoying victory, Leon feels a set of wiry digits curl around his head from behind, suddenly tearing into his nasal cavity. He bellows as the fingers rip through his lips and up his brow, and Cygnus bites through the skin of his neck. Releasing Bond, Hinx stumbles backward, bruising his assailant against the walls. Q doesn’t let go. Blood pours from his eyelids, his nose, and his throbbing nape. He feels his face coming apart. In desperation, he finds his grip on the traitor’s shoulders, and he grips into them, tossing the spindly body over his head. Cygnus slams over the adjacent table with a dead thud.

Leon stumbles then in the direction of the cargo bay, groping through his own blood for dinner knives and edges of china – anything he could wield – as these implements slip again and again from his grasp. He had intended on trickling the life out of 007 slowly and returning to Tetricus with the quartermaster in shambles, incapacitated but alive; he had been overzealous to do it with his bare hands. A change of plan is in order. The agent’s gun, he knows, would scan and reject his palm print. Hurling the Walther PPK through an open window, he trips down the aisle, well aware of 007 and Cygnus regrouping behind him. Between the damaged lamps and the brew of fluids in his eyes, the compartment is quickly becoming unnavigable. 

Hinx sways in the doorframe, trying vainly to clear his vision. His arm, although only moderately slit, is beginning to contract with exertion, and the lower half of his face is imbrued in sticky, sour gore. Cygnus is already on his feet, and the agent is at his heel. The knife… he curses as the hilt slides past his fingertips. He can even hear it clattering behind the luggage carts somewhere. It’s no good. Standing abruptly, he makes for the cargo loading door, breaks the lock, shoves it open, and waits. The night air rushes through him. When Cygnus appears in the bay, his spectacles smudged and ill-fitting, crystals of glass falling loose of his skin, his suit splotched violet with blood, Leon crushes his throat with his right arm and immobilizes the waif’s hands with his left. Q wheezes and shakes against his captor, but to no avail. Leon tightens his hold until Cygnus’ wrist creak, and he drags him toward the threshold of the desert exterior. Bond follows them shortly.

“One move, and we find out how loud he can scream.” Hinx holds Cygnus prone like a trophy. Already, the boffin is beginning to go limp; his carotid arteries are pounding, and Leon relishes his triumph. 007 smiles back enigmatically. 

“Our plans for him aren’t so different in that respect.” 

Cygnus’ foot slams down without warning on top of his own, and a sharp protrusion slices straight through Hinx’s toes. And for a moment nothing happens. For a moment, the men teeter on the edge of the open air. And then Leon starts to fall backwards, and Cygnus falls with him, squirming in his clutches. In the instant their heads pass under the eaves of the car, Q realizes that he can see Cassiopeia, and his mouth clogs with dust and sand. The force of the wind alongside the train suffocates him, almost knocking him senseless. The quartermaster could swear he hears James calling to him. It takes Q several seconds to recognize that he is still on the threshold of the cargo bay, half-way lying on Leon’s chest, half-way caught in Bond’s arms. Hinx is clinging to the doorframe behind him but quickly faltering; taking his opportunity, the boffin latches onto James and slicks away from his captor like oil before Leon loses his grip. 

When the brutish body is gone over the side of the train, Bond secures the door, replaces the lock, and allows himself an opportunity to rest, leant against the wall. He’s sore in muscles he forgot existed. There are splinters of mahogany piercing around his shoulderblade. His head hurts like murder, but the pain begins to subside a little as Q runs a surprisingly cool hand against his temple. Soon, his friend is slumped beside him, breaths heaving and still jittery from the fight. “Mr. Hinx is – he’s gone.”

“Yes,” Bond confirms, touching lightly over Brandy’s fingertips. Even like this, he can feel his boffin’s pulse, and the younger man blinks rapidly without seeming to know what to say. Finally, he gathers his slight knees to his chest.

“What do we do now?”

 

Bond couldn’t give a single detail of patching up after their tangle with Hinx, except how he and Q seem to end up caressing each other, as if to establish that they’re still in one piece, and increasingly unable to stop. His senses swim with desire – for that slender grasp; to see Q’s eyes ache when he touches him; to feel inseparable.

 

By the time they stumble through the door of their booth, and Q’s arms are around his neck, and James is kissing Brandy feverishly, massaging his legs, rubbing him closer until the boffin shudders helplessly in his embrace, they can’t pull apart. He’s circling the small of Q’s back, coaxing him in, and every sensation – his excitement, his heat, his thirst – compounds and becomes overwhelming. Brandy feels his back arch, and his lover holds him up. When James tells him he’s precious like this, he doesn’t quite manage a reply. With his palm, Bond smooths an obsidian curl out of the boffin’s eyes. 

Q nuzzles James’ bicep, awash in an almost dreamlike sense of anticipation. An intoxicating sheen of spice and sweat soaks into him through Bond’s shirt, and he shucks it; Brandy drags his fingers along the agent’s chest admiringly. He trails the landscape of James’ skin, brushing over his scars and light wrinkles, the lines of his muscles, down to his abdomen. He can see the effect it has on Bond. Capturing his hips, James hoists him backwards onto the table, knocking away a flower vase and tearing at the hem of his trousers. His eyes are dusky as he fumbles through his medical kit. Flushing his body with the agent’s pliably, Q kisses his shoulder, and Bond swears. And then James is tipping him backwards, caressing up his thighs and below his back, and Q wraps his legs around his waist. 

Bond’s mouth teases his open; his hands are kneading up Q’s shoulders into his hair, angling their heads, as his hips slide deeper into Brandy’s. Neither can breathe. 

 

When eventually they trip into bed together, and James is propped over Brandy, drinking in his every whisper and whimper and gasp, feeling his own movements grow more careful and affectionate the longer they lie together, he wonders idly if he hadn’t always wanted this with Q and it had just taken something extraordinary to make him see it. He asks himself how that pair of evergreen eyes could be as unguarded with him after so many misunderstandings. But Brandy’s lips press against his, drawing him back to the present – and James lets himself be drawn, almost before he can apprehend that he’s falling in love.

 

Their train rattles quietly past Oum El Assel, the grey sky blooming pink behind the desert’s stone arches. In the twilight, Brandy is as still and fresh-fallen as alpine snow – and James is transfixed. He had understood in theory why Vesper used to watch him thus, but only now does he find the act beautiful himself. James believes she would be satisfied if she knew.

His black locks, already flyaway and petulant, are unmanageably tousled from their night together. The faintest blemish is forming by his lip. Dark bruises from the battle with Hinx run in bands around his wrists, neck, forearms, and back. Q’s pretty, remarkably youthful features are almost epicene. Even in his sleep, he looks too sincere. When Brandy wakes, the agent thinks, and the rose-gold morning rays hit his eyes, and his cheeks flush the color of honey, and he flutters for a moment between oblivion and awareness, it will be unbearable. 

They will arrive at their station by 2 in the afternoon, with only Q’s laptop, his first aid supplies, a change of clothes, and one back-up pistol between them. For a while, he watches the sky grow pale; Q stirs to nestle his cold nose into Bond’s shoulder. Reaching toward the table slowly so as not to disturb Brandy, James checks his watch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew, finally Q and James stop flirting get a room! This was my first go at a love scene, so I hope it wasn’t too cringe-inducing. D= I know that it’s sort of fannon for Q’s real name to be Quentin, but in Bond (Wo)man spirit, I wanted to give him the name of something that Bond (probably) likes and thought Brandy Alexander sounded cute. Family history is loosely inspired by Ben Whishaw’s, as described in interviews. 
> 
> I’m super excited to write these next few chapters and will try to keep posting every week or two. Always a big thank you for reading this super inconsistent fic, and a special thanks to you amazing commenters!! Happy holidays, everyone! <3

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Just as a note, Q's Day of the Dead costume (namely, the idea for flowers in his hair) is loosely inspired by excellent Tumblr fan art by milo36. Also, Juan Preciado is a reference to the book "Pedro Paramo," for those who may be wondering! I think that's it. The next two chapters should be up very soon, but after that the pace will slow down a bit.


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